Gathered by the Spirit

Sunday, May 27, 2007
Pentecost Sunday
Genesis 11:1-9 & Acts 2:1-21

If you happened to walk past a particular courtyard near Columbia Seminary a year and a half ago on a crisp autumn day, you would not have believed your eyes.

Twelve adults were spinning, around and around and around – spinning like little children do when they’re pretending they’re tops or helicopters or just trying to make themselves dizzy.

Twelve seminary students were spinning and spinning and spinning, faster and faster and faster as they enacted and lived into the story of Pentecost.

And I, along with most of the other students in the class, eventually fell to the ground dizzy and a little out of sorts. The Holy Spirit had just descended upon us and overwhelmed us and left us amazed and astonished and perplexed, and a little out of breath.

At least that’s what the professor of this course was aiming for when she designed this particular day of class. Some way of conveying what it might have been like on that day years ago. What it might have been like to be a disciple on that first day of Pentecost.

Picture it: Gathered together in the upper room of a house, trying to figure out what to do. Their leader Jesus had been crucified, had risen from the dead and appeared to them, and then hung around for fifty days. Just recently Christ had ascended into heaven.

So far, they had replaced the delinquent disciple Judas with Matthias. That order of business had been taken care of. But what to do next, now that Jesus had ascended in a cloud?

Perhaps they were brainstorming plans of action. Perhaps they were debating the merits of going back to fishing. Perhaps they were sitting silently in the room, just looking at one another, without a clue as to what to do next.

Regardless, the Holy Spirit caught them by surprise. Coming with wind and fire and tongues. Filling them up and giving them the ability to speak other languages.

And in that whirlwind moment, the Holy Spirit – the mysterious, forceful, powerful, dizzying Spirit – gathered them together as disciples and bestowed upon them the power of God.

And it would look and sound to others like they were drunk and out of their minds. But the movement was not haphazard and crazy. It brought disciples together. Gathered them into a group that would go forward and become the leaders on The Way and live the great stories of the early church in the book of Acts.

Because it was the Holy Spirit’s doing.

It’s the exact opposite of what we heard in the first scripture lesson from Genesis.

In the story of the Tower of Babel, the people of God start off gathered together – gathered together by their one language with all the same words and nuances; gathered together by a common purpose.

They are going to build for themselves a city with a tower that will reach to the heavens. The people are gathered together by their hubris, by their own need to make a name for themselves and accomplish something great.

And the Lord knows this gathering could become troublesome. So the Lord confuses the language of all the people and scatters them over all the face of the earth. This gathering was not the work of the Holy Spirit. This gathering had been about individuals and their (literal) climb to the top.

And so the Lord puts the kibosh on it. Stops it before it gets too far and people think they can live their lives and do anything they please without paying any attention to the Lord.

Because that’s not the way. The way, as we see in Acts, is simply about being gathered in by the Holy Spirit to worship the Lord and then letting the Holy Spirit move in and through and amongst those gathered.

For the Holy Spirit does still dwell and move among us. The Holy Spirit was not a one hit wonder as some may believe. The Holy Spirit calls out, gathers in, and sends out individuals and churches still.

Here are two places I’ve seen it happen:

It was March of my senior year of college. I chose to spend my spring break traveling to Jamaica with twenty-four other Hope students. We spent ten days working at the Caribbean Christian Center for the Deaf, or CCCD.

CCCD is a boarding school for children who are deaf. It is a response to the high per capita population of people who are deaf in Jamaica.

We spent the early part of our days working at the school to build new classrooms and repair security walls. But we finished our work by 3pm each day so we could play and interact with the children when they got out of class.

And though we had a unique language barrier to work through,
we laughed and played and worshipped together.
I learned to play Duck, Duck, Goose without speaking
and to play volleyball and communicate with team members who could not hear.

And I was able to attempt one-on-one conversations with some of the older students. Though my sign language background is limited, I had the most wonderful conversation with one girl in particular.

She got excited because I knew some sign and her fingers started flying. I had to tell her to slow down many times so I could catch what she was saying, but I enjoyed that conversation so much.

During that week and a half, we were gathered in by the Spirit despite our language differences – despite the fact that some of us knew a little sign language and some none at all, despite the fact that some of the children could read lips and others could not. We were gathered by the Spirit to be a community that laughed and worshipped together for those ten days.

A couple of summers ago, I was a part of another community infused by the Holy Spirit. I was spending a week at the Taizé community in the south of Burgundy, France. Taizé is an international, ecumenical community of brothers who have taken lifelong vows. Young adults from around the world travel there to become part of the community life for a week.

Visitors are housed in bunk rooms with others who speak the same language. The week that I visited, over 1,000 young adults were there, though it was a slow week. In this wide and varied group of individuals, only four people were from the United States and the other three were males. So I ended up living with seven other women for whom English was their second language, of many.

But despite cultural differences, we were gathered in by the rhythm of the day at Taize. Each person contributing to the community through chores and assignments in the morning; each person joining a Bible study group to learn and study together; each person given some free time.

Those things helped to structure our days, but worship was at the center of it all. Communal worship happens three times a day – 8am, 12 noon, and 8pm. At those times, everything else in the community stops as all are gathered together in worship by what could only be the Holy Spirit.

There would be silence – deep silence. And then, the service would begin. And the silence would be broken by a single voice that turned into a swelling of a multitude of voices singing praises to God, praises in Latin and English and Spanish and German and French and Italian.

The unfamiliar words were awkward in my mouth, but the worship was familiar – all being directed to the Lord who would move through the world in a mighty rushing wind, who would gather together such a diverse group of people to fill that place and in so doing, fill them with the Holy Spirit.

May we be gathered by that Holy Spirit this morning –
gathered as those who
struggle for justice,
work for peace,
take risks,
love God and neighbor,
and follow Christ’s example.

May we be gathered by the Holy Spirit as Lakeview Presbyterian Church;
gathered as the one body of Christ;
gathered together as the disciples on that first Pentecost –
amazed and astonished by the movement of the Holy Spirit.

May it be so. Amen.