Empowered by a Loving God

Good morning. I need to turn myself on, don't I? Yep, there we go. Good morning. Well, you may notice that we don't have a Gospel reading this morning because today is Pentecost. So every year we come back to this narrative, this story in Acts chapter 2. Because it's been awhile since we've actually looked at Acts, first, I wanted to provide a just a recap of where we are before I read our chapter, or scripture, this morning. So Acts was, again, written by Luke who wrote the Gospel and he wrote it knowing that he would be writing this next, this second part. And Acts chapter 1 begins with Jesus being among the disciples. He has not yet ascended. And he tells the disciples, that when he leaves, to return to Jerusalem and to wait there for the Holy Spirit.

And he says that it is not for them to know the times, the details of God's plan. But rather they will receive the power of the Holy Spirit and that they will become God's witnesses in Judea, Samaria, to all the ends of the Earth. This is Christ telling them that when he is gone, he will send the Holy Spirit. We have a lot of different names for this Holy Spirit. Companion. A Counselor. Or an Advocate. But with the Holy Spirit we have the assurance that we are not alone.

We pick up in Acts chapter 2.

When Pentecost Day arrived, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound from heaven like the howling of a fierce wind filled the entire house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be individual flames of fire alighting on each one of them. They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages as the Spirit enabled them to speak. There were pious Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. When they heard this sound [that is, the sound of the disciples speaking in different languages], a crowd gathered. They were mystified because everyone heard them speaking in their native languages. They were surprised and amazed, saying, "Look, aren't all the people who are speaking Galileans, every one of them? How then can each of us hear them speaking in our native language? Parthians, Medes and Elamites; as well as residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the regions of Libya bordering Cyrene; and visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism), Cretans and Arabs-- we hear them declaring the mighty works of God in our own languages!" They were all surprised and bewildered. Some asked each other, "What does this mean?" Others jeered at them, saying, "They're full of new wine!" Peter stood with the other eleven apostles. He raised his voice and declared, "Judeans and everyone living in Jerusalem! Know this! Listen carefully to my words! These people aren't drunk, as you suspect; after all, it's only nine o'clock in the morning! Rather, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:

'In the last days. God says, "I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy. Your young will see visions. Your elders will dream dreams. Even upon my servants, men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy."'" This is the Word of God for the People of God.

There is so much here.

And, for the last few weeks, we have been working through a series. We began with being marked by loving God learning how it is our capacity to love as Christ loved that marks us as followers of Christ. The world will know that we are Christians by how we love. And then we explored how, what it means to be sent by loving God. That we are given the Peace of Christ that surpasses all understanding. That God sent the Son to us. And then God and the Son sent the Holy Spirit to us. And now we are called to be sent and to send others.

Last week we talked about embodied, that we are embodied by a loving God. That we actually become the body of Christ in the world.

You'll notice here that on the banner there's a dove. The only mention of the Holy Spirit as the dove comes in the Gospel, when the Spirit descended like a dove upon Jesus during his baptism. There is no mention of a dove on Pentecost. The reason I mention this is because now the Holy Spirit is present within us. We are the body of Christ. We are the hands and feet of God in the world. God is choosing to invite us to work with God in partnership to help spread the kingdom of God.

And today we're talking about empowerment. We are empowered by a loving God. There was someone who said that without Pentecost we are just a people who tell the story of Christ, but with Pentecost we are people who live into the story of Christ. Pentecost, the gift of the Holy Spirit, this is what empowers us. This is what fuels us. This is what gives us the courage to leave the house that we want to hide in.

1 Timothy chapter 1 verse 7 says that God did not give us a spirit of fear and timidity but rather of power and love and self-discipline. The passage from Romans says that all who are led by God Spirit are sons and daughters. God did not give us a spirit of slavery so that we could return back to the old ways of doing things, that we could return back to us a spirit of fear, where we we have to know all of the laws and all of the rules and we have to be careful to keep every one of them because God is just waiting for us to mess up.

As Israel has messed up time and again.

But the message of Christ,

the message of the Holy Spirit

is that God loves us.

God loves us. As broken and messed up as we are, God loves us. And God calls us to allow God to work through us. I can think back on the times when preaching I bomb. It doesn't go well.

And I'm pretty sure that every one of those instances have one thing in common.

I started thinking a little too highly of myself. I started depending a little too much...

...on my thoughts, my ideas.

And sometimes those ideas will line up with the Spirit and all will be well, but sometimes I don't listen well when the Spirit is telling me that is not the message today.

So most Sunday mornings, my prayer is "Let me get out of the way. Let me get out of your way. Use me as a vessel. Help me to preach the word that people need to hear."

Friends, God loves us.

And in the midst of all this division in the world, this fighting, this squabbling.

It is in the church that we are called to love as Christ loved us.

It is in the church that when someone new comes to our table - even though our table may be full - we still sit just a little bit closer to make room for this new person. Because that's what families do, right? Families will sacrifice just a little bit more. We'll sacrifice a little bit more of our comfort so that you can sit down at this table with us.

I went to Annual Conference this week and I heard a lot of really good messages. And I heard a not-super-interesting presentation by the bishop on the appointment process.

"Demystifying the Appointment Process." Because, you know, in the Methodist Church pastors are called to be sent. Right? So the authority of where a pastor goes rests in the hands of the bishop. And he said that he tries to take that kind of power lightly. You know, a church's Staff Parish Relations Committee, pastors, District Superintendents, all of these people work with the bishop, to consult with the bishop to help him have a better sense of what's happening. But the bishop did say this. He said that whenever he is making an appointment, it is his responsibility not to be thinking of how the pastor will receive this move. Not to be thinking of how the church will receive this move. Because it is not about the comfort of the pastor. It is not about the comfort of the church. It is about the mission field... in which the church finds itself.

And he talked about how sometimes churches will specifically request a man

to which he says, "So, let me get this straight, if I have two people... a woman who is gifted and excels in her work and a man who's just kind of eh,

you'd rather have the man?"

The bishop, the church, the way we are designed, the way we are structured... it's not perfect by any means, but it is aware of the tendency that we can have to put our comfort first. It is aware of the tendency that we have to just sit together in the room,

comfortable the people that we are with and not getting out.

Not stepping to the edge of our little circle of comfort and meeting people.

We talk a lot about people being on the margins, that Christ was, is sent to the margins for them. Christ was sent to the people who find themselves without a community, who find themselves in isolation from the world.

Because people have rejected them. Because people have told them that they were useless. That they were a problem.

Something to be solved or fixed.

And, until they were like them, they had no place in their community.

God, Christ comes to the margins.

To the edges. But I think it's more than just the edges of our society, it's also the edge of our comfort zone. Yeah? Now God is not saying for all of us to go to Kenya tomorrow. God calls us to be where we are. And sometimes the danger of feeling that we have to get the call right, we have to know what God is calling us to do, we cannot mess up... Sometimes the danger is that we will spend so long looking for the X marks the spot somewhere else that we never realize it's under our feet.

God calls us. God works with us where we are.

And through the Spirit we are given the power, the ability to discern what God is calling us to do. And sometimes that call will go against everything we've learned.

Sometime that call will challenge our perception of the world, our understanding of Good and Evil.

Christ says love your enemies.

All of your enemies.

That includes the people that our nation is at war with. That includes the people who would want to see us harmed. We are called to love.

We are called to remember

that every single one of us, every single human being on this planet is made in the image of God. It might be a little hard to see. But it's there.

And when we view each other as anything less than the image of God, we are doing them and us and God a disservice.

Because we are more than the color of our skin.

We are more than how much money we have.

We are more than what education we do or don't have. Fill in the blank. We are the image of God. We are children of God, whether or not we know that. And God calls us to share that good news.

God calls us to go out and to love others as Christ has loved us.

We were not chosen to be comfortable.

We were chosen to participate in God's mission. We were chosen to cooperate with God.

We were, we are chosen

to choose to be uncomfortable for the sake of God's Kingdom.

When God, when Christ sent the disciples out into the world

God didn't say, "Go out and make judgments."

He didn't say, "Go out and tell people how wrong they are about something."

He just says, "Go and make disciples.

Go and share the good news. Go and love one another as I have loved you."

This is the call of the church.

And maybe we can tell ourselves that the community around us is so different, or they're Catholic, even if they don't go to church, they're Catholic. We give up before we even start or maybe we have tried and it didn't work.

But friends sometimes the Spirit works slowly.

When we describe the gifts of the Spirit, the fruit of the Spirit, it's a fruit. Fruit has to grow first. They have to begin as a seed. It has to be nurtured and tended to and then it will become fruit.

The bishop sends us not because of what the church necessarily needs, but because of what the mission field needs.

And until yesterday or the day before I kind of forgot that.

I kind of forgot that it is my responsibility to have those hard conversations, not to tell you what I think and to say this is how you must think, but no, but to start that conversation. To say "Hey, here's something that I'm wrestling with. Here's something that I'm tired of us avoiding. Here's something that I'm tired of us not looking at and ignoring."

And that includes the Border.

It is the churches along the border who are most in the position to help the most. There's a church in Eagle Pass, Texas doing more than we are

right now to help with the crisis at the border.

And the churches, the people, the nonprofits who are working together to help, they are so overwhelmed.

I have one friend who got sick, really sick.

because

bacteria, viruses will develop differently in different places. And sometimes we don't have the antibodies to fight something very well. So she got sick for a long time. She's better now.

But it's still a risk we're called to take.

I'm not saying, you know, be stupid and never wash your hands. We can do what we can to protect ourselves. But we cannot do is to let our fear, or our desire for comfort, keep us from taking the first step.

I'm reminded of an Indiana Jones movie because I'm a geek and that's what I do.

The movie, there's a scene in movie where he, there's this long chasm and it looks like there's no way across. And I forget the details but he's essentially told no there's a bridge, there's a way across. And so finally he takes a step over what seems to be there and there's this invisible bridge. Suspension of disbelief, okay?

I think God understands our fear.

But God has given us Christ and God has given us the Spirit, so that we can choose not to succumb to our fear. The definition of courage is not having, is not being afraid. The definition of courage is being afraid and doing something anyway.

We are called to take the first step.

The world around us is anxious right now.

And one of the verses that someone shared, I'm gonna read it on my phone cuz he shared it from The Message translation and it was actually pretty good, so you're gonna have to bear with me for a sec while I do this. The world around us is anxious. Our church, our denomination is anxious. Many of us don't know what the future holds. We don't know what the United Methodist Church is going to look at, look like in one year or 5 years or 10 years. We don't even know if there will be a United Methodist Church anymore.

That's how bad it is.

But someone shared this verse from Philippians chapter 4 verses 6 and 7. "Don't fret or worry. Instead of worrying, pray. Let petitions and praises shape your worries into prayers, letting God know your concerns. Before you know it, a sense of God's wholeness, everything coming together for good, will come and settle you down.

It's wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life." I'm gonna say that again. "It's wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life."

The task ahead of us is hard.

It can require hard decisions. It can require sacrifices on our part. But friends that is what God calls us to do. We are the family of God in this world. We should live our lives in such a way that people want to know more. And then our job when they ask us is not to have an exhaustive knowledge of scripture or even what we believe as United Methodist. Our job is simply to say, "Come and see."

Come and see what God is doing in this church. Come and see what God is doing through us. Come and see.

I'll end with one last example. Our guest speaker was a guy named Tom Berlin who's the pastor of a big church in Florida, big Methodist church, and I'm going to be honest. I didn't think he was going to be that good. Cuz like I mean, he just kind of looked nerdy in his picture. Shame on me, right? I didn't know what to expect and I made a judgment before I got there. Like man, this isn't going to be good.

I'm gonna have to stay here in a freezing cold conference room.

With hundreds of other people who I love, but oh my goodness, so many people.

And I'm gonna have to listen to this guy.

But he taught on one of his books, it's called Reckless Love and I'm hoping that we will explore this together. I think we would really like it, but... one example specifically that he shared that stuck is he showed a picture of something that kind of looks like a metal plunger. And he was like, "What is this?" Plunger? No.

It's an agitator. Because, back before we had washing machines and dryers to do the work for us, our clothes would be washed in a tub of water.

It's not enough for the clothes just to be wet in a tub of water.

They have to be agitated in order to get clean. It was like a little light bulb went off. A gentle agitation. That's what we have to do. That's what, that's what my job is, right? And I'm the one who's supposed to agitate you. Just a little bit, not so much that you like, "Oh my goodness, I cannot go to church today.

I don't want to hear what she's going to say. I'm going to be so uncomfortable. I'm going to have to do something. What?"

It's my job to agitate you just, just a little bit. Just to shake loose the stuff that just collects, that builds up if we, if we're not aware of it, if we don't tend to it. And here's the harder thing. I have to agitate myself.

Because I cannot stand up here and say something, if I'm not willing to do it, too.

So this morning we celebrate Pentecost.

We remember the gift of the Holy Spirit on the disciples.

We remember that we are empowered by God to do what God calls us to do.

We may not feel equipped, but we're empowered. We will probably mess up-- No, we will mess up. But it's okay. Cuz God can work even with our mistakes. God chose to work with us in the first place, right? It's not like God didn't know what he was getting into.

But God chooses

to be Invitational. God chooses to love vulnerably.

God chooses to invite us to his table.

And God reminds us, it's not your job to figure out who sits here and who doesn't. It's not your job to stand at the front of the table with a baseball bat.

It is your job to make room for those who come to Christ's table. Amen?