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“Institutions and Movements”
Acts 2:1-12
Pentecost Sunday
A Sermon preached by the Rev. Douglas M. Donley
What a day this is. It’s full of spirit, it’s full of celebration, it’s full of red colors and candles. It’s even a sunny day. Why ruin it with an annual meeting?
Actually, the meeting doesn’t need to ruin it. It can enliven us and empower us, at least it should. We have this wonderful influx of spirit that washes over us at Pentecost. The movement of the Spirit makes the movement of the church happen. 3000 people joined on that first day. People broke down the barriers that once divided them. They all of a sudden understood each other, even though their families and their cultures had been at odds for centuries. All of them understood that there was something greater that united them. It obscured and made folly all of their divisions.
This is how the church was born. It was born to break down those dividing walls. And the dry bones in the valley began to have new life. This new movement decided it should not have its members own property, so they sold all they had and held everything in common. Everything went along great until they started trying to make the movement into an institution. That’s when they had to go to meetings. But it was not that the meetings weren’t important, but sooner or later they stopped focusing on the movement and started focusing on the institution.
People started having discussions about who was good enough to be a part of the church and who wasn’t.
They started dividing people up racially, or whether they had been Jewish before. Then they started dividing people up based upon their gender. And before long, the denominations started. There was the Appollos party and the Paul party and the Cephas party and the Jesus party and the zealot party. Later on there were the Arians, and the Athenasuians and the Manicheans and the Gnostics. Then came the Jesuits and the Dominicans and the Paulists and the Baptists and the Lutherans and the Quakers, each of them trying to say that they were the best or the truest or the purest.
And all of them missed the point of Pentecost. They, or should I say we, turned the movement of the Spirit born at Pentecost into an institution.
Do you know how you define a movement? It is something that exists to change people’s lives. It moves. It grows. It expands. It challenges the status quo. It causes revolutions. It upsets people in power. It turns over tables and turns lives around.
And institution on the other hand is what happens to a movement when it grows up. It creates a structure. It has meetings. It funds the structure. It exists to maintain order. It exists to perpetuate itself. It resists change and it is entirely predictable.
No one
could have predicted what happened at Pentecost. People were gathered in
I don't know what the disciples expected to receive. It would seem that they were not ready for what happened. Jesus had died and had risen and appeared to the disciples a few times, but even those visits were becoming a distant memory. They were sure that they were commissioned to start a new movement, but they just didn't have a whole lot of energy.
They lacked vision. They lacked power. They lacked the wonder which comes from dreaming. They lacked any kind of fire held up in their bones. They lacked that which would sustain them. They lacked the passion that they needed in order to actually start the movement. They lacked a sense of enthusiasm.
So, they went back to the old
rituals. They went with everyone else to
In ancient times, the people
gathered in order to build a tower as high as the heavens, but God did not like
the fact that they wanted to have such direct contact. So God dashed down that
God, we know, has always been suspect of the power of nation-states and their so-called rulers. Thirty three plus years before Pentecost, one such ruler called all of the people together to be counted. God used that event to incarnate God's self in Jesus. And now at Pentecost, God was about to give another gift to the people in so much need.
Think about your needs. Are you broken down by all of the messages out there? Do you need your Spirit re-charged? The people at Pentecost sure did. God gave the gift of the Holy Spirit to the people on that Pentecost feast. And for a while, a brief while, the barriers which languages wrought were disbanded and people were able to converse with each other. It's a lot easier to be the enemy of someone you don't understand, but when you can communicate, the walls are broken down, at least for a bit.
A professor of mine at Union Theological Seminary, James Cone, always said that true theology is only done in dialogue. That means getting to know the joys and fears of those you oppose, listening to their music, discovering what gives them life. Then and only then can we really do theology. The people at Pentecost had amazing dialogue.
A week from now, Jon Smith and I will join about 100 Soulforce volunteers who will go to the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in Phoenix Arizona. There, we will speak with fellow Baptists. We will tell our stories and encourage our Baptist sisters and brothers to stop spreading untruths about the GLBT communities. I prayerfully hope that I have conversations with one or more Southern Baptists while I’m there, not only to tell them my truth, but to hear theirs. I want to put into practice this movement of the Spirit which breaks down barriers between us. I want to see what it feels like to speak in a different language. It’s so easy to retreat back to my own cocoon of Welcoming and Affirming Baptists. But Pentecost is about a movement of the Spirit which will change hearts and minds.
I see this Pentecostal Spirit every time we host Families Moving Forward, where we share meals and lives with people very different from ourselves for a week. And always , ALWAYS at the end we realize that there are vast similarities which we had never before seen.
I see this Pentecostal Spirit when our children sing or we make music as a congregation. We touch some place below our collective consciousness and we find a power and a beauty and a sense of longing.
I see this Pentecostal Spirit as we teach our children and young people and often find that we are being taught by them as we seek to understand their languages and their life situations.
I see this Pentecostal Spirit as we seek to live into our ministry and do the very best we can with our limited resources. We always find out that when we let the Spirit move, we have more talent, more energy and more possibilities at our disposal than we had ever thought possible.
And so I even see this Pentecostal Spirit alive when we do the work of the Institution of this church, because I know this church refuses to remain an institution that exists only to perpetuate itself.
We are part of a movement of Spirit which saves lives and changes lives.
We are a movement of Spirit that seeks to break down the dividing walls that we are so good at setting up.
We are movement that is a force with which to be reckoned.
And a spirit-inspired movement cannot be stopped.
It gains momentum as it breaks down more barriers and shows the love of God to ourselves and a people in need.
That’s what we celebrate on this church birth-day.
That’s what we celebrate, the birth of a movement that continues in each of us and that expands to change the world.
That’s a movement that I’m glad to be a part of.