This week in Bible study, Jann Weaver told a story that held us all spellbound. With her permission, I’m sharing with you also, now. Many years ago, Jann was a freshly ordained pastor serving in the small Wisconsin town of Barneveld. In the middle of the night, an E-5 tornado ripped through town, leaving 9 people dead—including a two year old from their church, the Moderator’s granddaughter. 90% of the town’s buildings were destroyed. Jann and the members of her congregation lost pretty much everything they had. On the Sunday after this event (which happened to be Pentecost Sunday), Jann reassured the congregation: as a community supporting each other in their homelessness and grief, they were still a church even though they didn’t have a church building.
Some members of the congregation went to other worship services that day, where they heard the text from Acts. And, having just lived through a violent wind, they heard it differently than ever before. They found this story terrifying and traumatic. Indeed, in Acts, the Spirit shows up amid tremendous disruption, essentially at the scene of a disaster. The previous chapter of Acts describes a large gathering of Jesus’ followers—120 people, sharing life and prayer. And then the Spirit’s coming brought throngs more, curious to find out what was going on. “All were amazed and perplexed,” the narrator says. Not amazed in a good way; more like “bewildered.” “What does this mean?” they asked, seeking a way to interpret an indescribable event. Clearly the scene was chaotic, since Peter felt compelled to insist, “These people are not drunk, as you suppose.”
The Holy Spirit is a chameleon. That’s my conclusion as I read this morning’s two scriptures side by side. In contrast to Acts, the passage from John describes a quiet, intimate encounter. It was just Jesus and his closest friends gathered behind locked doors. Though the wounds of Jesus were prominently visible, they had healed into scars. Though the community remained afraid and shaken, some time had passed since the initial disaster had occurred. Jesus gave them the Spirit not with violent winds or fiery tongues but with the gentle gesture of breathing on them.
Reflecting on her town’s catastrophic experience, Jann said, “I didn’t believe we could ever recover.” And yet as time went on, she witnessed how the Spirit showed up in the wreckage. The storm fundamentally changed everything for everyone. The tornado itself was not God’s doing, but it did create an opening for the Spirit to work. She put it this way: “The community—both the church and township—came together in new, enlivening ways after the storm; we had a community we didn’t have before.”
Today’s texts also point toward the Spirit’s extraordinary power to create connection. In Acts, the people speaking in many languages were all Galileans. And those who showed up to listen were all immigrants, Jewish people in diaspora, residents of Jerusalem who spoke the languages of the entire known world. This ability to speak in tongues was not a trick meant to impress anyone; it was a gift given to facilitate understanding and collaboration among people who would otherwise find it impossible to understand each other. This Spirit outpouring of dreams and visions on “all flesh” all together was a manifestation of what the prophet Joel imagined would happen in the last days. The last days, not the end of the world, but the times when the world as we know it is falling apart, when the weight of oppression is too heavy to bear, when people are painfully alienated from each other.
And, similarly, in the Gospel of John, Jesus gave the disciples peace and then pushed them back out into the world to do the work of healing. “As the Mother/ Father God has sent me, so I send you.” “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them.” Core to their Spirit-powered ministry was the restoration of broken relationships. Their work, too, was to make connection and collaboration possible in new and surprising ways. The next line, “If you retain the sins of any, they are retained,” can be translated quite differently. The word “sins” is actually not present in there at all, just assumed by the translator. So the line can instead mean something like: “Whoever you hold, they are held fast.” 1 In other words, the Spirit gives us the ability to be hold on to each other even amid disaster and trauma, even we weather the ways sin challenges our community cohesion. As we stand in the wreckage, the Spirit brings new possibilities for our togetherness and empowers those who are wounded and afraid to dream once more.
Last year around this same time, we began asking one another the question, “How do you show up to embody hope?” On hundreds of little pieces of paper displayed on ribbons around the sanctuary, we have recorded these actions. Next week we are going to take some time to do a gallery walk, taking stock of all these diverse ways we have shown up—reflecting, celebrating, and drawing strength from them. What these little scraps of paper mean to me is, “We can do this.” Whatever is coming our way, we can handle it, because we have each other and we have the Holy Spirit.
We are going to take the papers down next Sunday and start a new chapter. We’ll keep on telling our stories of mutuality, because they have the potential to help us see how loving our neighbor in an emergency can grow into working beside them to create a different society. And we will join together with neighbors of all kinds to defend democracy. And we will re-ground ourselves in our calling to public discipleship, to visibly bearing witness to the way Jesus in the places of our world in which decisions are made, money is exchanged, power is wielded, and lives are affected.
This day of Pentecost teaches us both that our actions matter and that we never act alone. Our languages of care and truth, our dreams of justice and visions of peace, are part of a large and diverse movement. We can trust that when we are tired, someone else will step up with fresh energy. And that what one person cannot do, our community can accomplish together. And that the Spirit will continue to show up with us and for us in ways we can’t yet imagine. Amen.