God will stop at nothing

Acts 2:1-21

1 Corinthians 12:3b-13

John 20:19-23
When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the
doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of
the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with
you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then
the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them
again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”
When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive
the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven
them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”


God, it seems, will stop at nothing to get at us. Ever since the garden, when we ran off with the juice of knowledge still sticky on our chins and shame still hot in our cheeks, God has been pursuing us.

When we refused to hear, decided we’d rather listen to the voices around us telling us who we ought to be because who we are wasn’t good enough, God still shouted and cajoled and cried out through judges and prophets, mothers and fathers, kings and queens and harlots and foreigners, shepherds and adulterers, young girls and old women past their childbearing years. Scripture is the history of God reaching out to us as we turn away. Again, and again, and again.

And when I say ‘us,’ I do mean the whole of humanity. It started with the Jewish people, with the tribes wandering in the desert, with the people of the promise, the ancestors of our three major faiths:
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Abraham and Moses, Isaac and Jacob, the chosen people who were just as diverse then as we are now. Just as conflicted, just as complicated. Just as stubborn. Just as divided.
Just as human, but specially chosen to be a light to the nations, God’s own people.

They told their stories, they worshiped God and held God accountable, they endured exile and rebuilding of the temple, they survived war and were colonized by Rome, and after all of this, the Messiah they were waiting for wasn’t the Messiah they were expecting. If we had known what a Messiah was supposed to be, well, we had our own gods to worship and our own traditions and rites back then. We were outside of that promise, outside of that hope until Christ. And in case we missed the memo then, the Holy Spirit broke everything open on the day of Pentecost.

We forget that we were not originally the insiders here. We were not supposed to be where we are. The majority of God-followers in that day did not organize with our inclusion in mind, did not begin with us at the center of the culture. The faith that we claim is a gift, not a position we are entitled to.

And if we get down to the nitty-gritty of it, we’re a bunch of outsiders who have been adopted into God’s family purely as an act of grace and generosity. This is the faith of the Jewish people that we have been brought into, the God of the Jews who we worship, just as complicated and diverse as ever. And as outsiders brought into the community, we know our place here through the life, death, and resurrection of God in the person of Jesus Christ. This God is bigger than any one religion, but we did not know our salvation until God stepped into our skin, and we would not even have had the curiosity to ask about or seek to follow this God if not for the work of the Holy Spirit.  As Luther says when he explains the third article of the Creed: "I believe that by my own understanding or strength I cannot believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to him, but instead the Holy Spirit has calls me through the gospel, enlightened me with his gifts, made me holy and kept me in the true faith, just as he calls, gathers, enlightens, and makes holy the whole Christian church on earth and keeps it with Jesus Christ in the one common, true faith. Daily in this Christian church the Holy Spirit abundantly forgives all sins - mine and those of all believers. On the last day the Holy Spirit will raise me and all the dead and will give to me and all believers in Christ eternal life. This is most certainly true."

And this is what we celebrate today. That the Spirit has been poured out and people can know God in their own skin, through their own language. Prophets and sages, Jesus Christ in flesh and blood, and a people usually divided are brought together by hearing that the good news of Jesus Christ is for them, no matter where they come from.

We struggle with this, and God knows it. Nobody likes to be on the outside, but once we've 'made it' we humans have a nasty habit of forgetting what it was like to be poor, or outcast, or looked down upon, and we sure don't want to return to outsider status, so we've gotten pretty good at avoiding those who seem less well-off. Avoiding the sick and the homeless lest we get infected or develop a reputation. God knows we struggle with living into the community of wholeness and shalom. Which is why that first word Jesus gives his disciples, when they are given the Spirit, is a word about forgiveness, about restoration, and the freedom to let go of our self-made divisions and all of the hurts we carry.

When I worked at Target, we had a bilingual staff. By which I mean most of us only spoke English and some of us spoke both English and Spanish. Which made some English-only speakers uncomfortable. There were some who were sure that when coworkers spoke in Spanish they must be talking trash about the rest of us. Never mind that those who spoke Spanish as a first language were struggling to learn better English, just needed to take a break once in awhile to rest in their mother tongue, same as you or I would need to do if we went abroad to another country who's main language was something other than English. We were all doing the same work, but had a hard time understanding each other.

Scripture was not handed down to us King James Version. Martin Luther risked his life by translating Scripture into the German language that his people spoke, out of the Greek and Hebrew it was originally in. He was moved by the Spirit to bring the Good News to the people in a time when it was deemed too dangerous for anyone other than the priests to be able to read it.

That's the miracle of this day. That we are all about the same work and by the Spirit all are able to hear in their own language about the love of God. They didn't have to learn Hebrew first. They didn't have to be circumcised first. They didn't have to sign a loyalty contract or give up their culture, Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia and Judea and Egypt and eventually Germany and India and Norway and Spain and Sweden and France and Russia and Brazil and Portugal and...

God came to us first, in our own language, not because our culture is superior but because God will allow nothing to get in between us, nothing to stand in the way when it comes to loving us and welcoming us and making of the whole world one community full of many languages and cultures and peoples.
And we will mess up when it comes to understanding this gift, we will mess up when it comes to understanding each other, but that is why we are given that great gift of forgiveness, the strength to do the work of peacemaking and community building.
And the gift continues to be poured out, on us and throughout the world, as the Spirit whispers in our ears that great eternal truth: "God loves you." And as the Spirit shouts it from the rooftops, "God loves you!" And as the Spirit is heard by old and young, East and West, rich and poor, in classrooms and churches, and in homes and wilderness wanderings, praying in the language of your own heart, "God loves you."

Because God will stop at nothing to love us. All of us. Amen.