There's Room For All people! A Pentecost Sunday Sermon By David B. Smith

There's Room For All people! A Pentecost Sunday Sermon By David B. Smith

by: David B. Smith
In my naivety I had thought till recently that these two components had been pure opposites that cancelled each other out, equivalent to if you blow on a birthday candle and the wind places the hearth out. After which all of us experienced those horrible bushfires in Victoria so recently, where wind and hearth mixed to generate these horrible hearth-balls that hurtled down metropolis streets at horrible speeds, consuming all the things in their path.
Wind and fire are a volatile combination that may destroy people and property and tear apart whole communities and yet they can additionally, it seems, give beginning to a neighborhood! Yes, it's Pentecost Sunday and we are celebrating immediately the start of the church. The church as a worldwide group has been dwelling and respiration now for a lot longer than any of us can bear in mind however (believe it or not) it did have a beginning and it is starting was here, within the wind and hearth of Pentecost.
No one was killed by that particular fiery wind as far as we know - not on that day, at any charge - however the wind and the hearth of the Spirit of God definitely did cause an excessive amount of chaos and confusion on that day. Things happened that people found laborious to elucidate. The disciples began behaving like loopy males, such that most people thought that they had been drunk, and then they started talking in strange tongues ‘such as the Spirit gave them utterance', and nobody knew fairly what was happening.
Such chaos may seem like remarkably fitting for the start of an organisation that has been characterised by befuddlement and confusion ever since, and but there was one thing very severe going down at the centre of that fireside. A new group was being fashioned, and it was being shaped out of a melting pot that combined persons of every race and language and folks and nation.
That is the thing that almost all stands out, I feel, in the best way the Luke, the writer of the e-book of Acts, tells the story of Pentecost - the almost tedious record of various nations and states which are represented within the Pentecost crowd.
The list sounds one thing like a roll call of the international locations of the identified world: We are Parthians, Medes, Elamites, folks from Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia, Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt, the district of Libya close to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome. We are Jews, proselytes, Cretans, and Arabs. Was there any Ancient Near Jap nation that wasn't represented?
It appears unusual that the writer should go into such element as to who was there. And yet a point is being made, and it's a level in regards to the foundation of the church and the nature of the church - that from the very starting, the church has always been a neighborhood that includes all people!
Of course, technically talking, they have been all Jews - the individuals who made up that Pentecost crowd, even when they have been Jews from a wide variety of backgrounds. And but the best way the creator of our story depicts the scene, I feel it is clear that he saw Pentecost as the start of one thing much larger and broader still.
The church begins with a group of Galilean Jews after which comes to include Jews from every corner of the globe, and then it starts to incorporate non-Jews.
The church begins as a largely working-class phenomenon, however fairly quickly we see her engaging with people from all courses and backgrounds and from every strata of society.
The church begins by concentrating on trustworthy members of the temple community however before lengthy she is drawing in international converts to Judaism, after which individuals who had never darkened the door of a synagogue at all.
What we see at Pentecost is the beginning of a dynamic process of exponential inclusiveness, the place both the scale and the scope of the Christian group continues to grow and transfer in direction of the purpose where Christ can be all in all!
And this is not only a peculiar strategy for organisational development. From a Biblical perspective there is something of cosmic significance taking place here, and it's the reversal of an historical curse.
When you remember the story of the Tower of Babel (as recorded in Genesis 11) it was an account of a horrible curse that came upon all individuals of the earth in response to their try to build an unlimited tower, as an affidavit to their own greatness.
The sin on view was a lust for power combined with human arrogance, and the punishment was that the individuals have been divided into different language groups so that their energy could be limited.
Dividing folks up has always been an effective way of limiting a individuals's energy, and we've seen any number of political regimes use the ‘divide an conquer' technique since. Even so, division, Biblically talking, is at all times a curse, and it appears that evidently at Pentecost God, by His Spirit, started to reverse that curse.
Whereas at Babel human beings had banded collectively to construct a community by which God had no place, at Pentecost God took the initiative of building a new neighborhood - the church - which had her creator at her centre.
Whereas the Babel community was constructed around a standard lust for energy, the church group would disavow power and centre itself as an alternative on service.
So whereas God got here down to Babel to miraculously confuse their language so that they could not understand one another or work collectively, at Pentecost God came down and miraculously bridged the communication gap, to be able to make true human neighborhood a possibility again!
What now we have with the birth of the church is the beginning of a vision - a imaginative and prescient of a very inclusive community - and I don't suppose we can afford to underestimate simply how radical that imaginative and prescient is, for such inclusiveness, it seems to me, is almost by definition intrinsically irreligious, for it has at all times been on the coronary heart of religion - any religion - to discriminate between who is a respectable member of the spiritual group and who is just not - to incorporate and to exclude.
Faith discriminates between who are the chosen people and people who aren't the chosen individuals, and while different religions provide you with different ways of drawing that boundary line so as to find out who's in and who is out, the fundamental idea of there being a boundary line between the true believers, on the one hand, and the pagans, heretics, infidels, and other ‘unworthies' on the other, is, I'd decide, fundamental, to nearly each non secular system?
There is an previous, and never notably humorous, joke that you will have heard, I think, about a guy who's being given his first tour round Heaven, and he notices that proper in the centre of Heaven is one massive sealed-off area with extraordinarily excessive brick walls enclosing it on all sides, such that you couldn‘t possibly see who or what was on the other aspect of those walls. The first-timer asks what this large prison area is for, and is told, Oh, that is the area for the Evangelicals. They actually wish to imagine that they're the only ones up right here, and God did not have the center to disappoint them by letting them see the rest of us.”
Of course you can substitute no matter group of non secular people you want into that joke and it still will not be particularly humorous but it surely does make an excellent point about how we non secular people assume. We predict in terms of insiders and outsiders, with us on the inside and any variety of others on the skin, and it‘sgenerally the community of the righteous that are recognized because the insiders. The chosen individuals are those who do not smoke, drink or chew or go along with girls who do.
Quite a lot of us were in all probability introduced up to think that way, whether we had been introduced up Anglican, Catholic, Baptist or Islamic, it all works roughly the identical way. The community of the righteous are those who do not lie, steal or commit adultery, whereas liars, thieves and adulterers are excluded from the neighborhood.
Perhaps, for some, it is a imaginative and prescient of Heaven - a place where all the healthful people go. In that case, it isn't a Pentecost vision, is it?
Thoughts you, I feel there may be an even more sinister type of spiritual exclusivism running rampant within the church at present. It isn't an try to construct a neighborhood of the righteous, but fairly to construct a community of the theologically correct
Here again there is a clear boundary line drawn between insiders and outsiders, between the saved and the unsaved, between the true believers and those that are destined to everlasting disgrace, and it's not an moral distinction between who is morally worthy and who's unworthy, but a distinction between who has their theology precisely right and who has failed the take a look at of orthodoxy.
In fact this isn't just a modern phenomenon. Certainly, should you look again at the historic creeds of the church you will note that the church has commonly tried to draw the boundary line between the saved and the unsaved on the basis of their theological orthodoxy.
And once more, perhaps for some this is a vision of Heaven - the fellowship of the theologically correct. And again, whether it is, I say to you that it's not a very Pentecostal imaginative and prescient.
In reality, I don't know what your vision of Heaven is, but I do know that the disciples of Jesus had to undergo a means of increasing their vision.
For the disciples, in their unique vision of Heaven it could have been a place totally populated by Jews. They had to learn to develop their imaginative and prescient.
For a lot of religious people earlier than and since our imaginative and prescient of Heaven has been of a community of righteous individuals. If that's us, we need to increase that vision!
And if we're laden down with a vision of Heaven because the community of the theologically appropriate then we likewise must increase that vision and replace it with that imaginative and prescient that comes to delivery at Pentecost - a vision of a very inclusive human group where no one is excluded - not because of their race or language, not due to their poor theology, not as a result of they are black or white or wealthy or poor or slave or free or homosexual or straight or male or feminine.
For the Kingdom of God that Jesus spoke of is a feast to which everybody is invited, and so the church of Jesus Christ that involves beginning at Pentecost with the intention to bear witness to that coming Kingdom is likewise a group that welcomes everyone without grilling them first about their beliefs or their culture or their gender or their sexual orientation and even their morality.
That is the vision of Pentecost, born in wind and hearth. Oh how much easier it would be if God had appointed us to construct a group of like-minded white people! How much simpler it will be to work with a homogenous unit, where all the troublesome individuals have been excluded.
How much easier it could be if we could ship away the mentally ill, the socially inept, and those with poor gown sense so that they may very well be part of another group. What a beautiful, hip and peaceful community we might have!
The one downside is that it will not be the church of Jesus Christ - born in the fiery wind of Pentecost, all the time chaotic, at all times stuffed with surprises, all the time exhausting work, however a multi-racial, multi-faceted community that's all the time testifying to a reality much larger than itself, and is at all times doing so with pleasure.
About The Creator
Rev. David B. Smith (the 'Preventing Father')
Parish priest, neighborhood employee, martial arts grasp, pro boxer, author, father of three.
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