St Luke’s, Havelock North – Pentecost Sunday 2007 - Sermon

“Alleluia, Where shall we go?” It’s the title of the song we sing before the gospel at 9.30 today and it’s a good question. Where shall we go? It’s a good question for us today and it was a good question for the disciples we’ve heard about in our first and last readings this morning.

Where shall we go? The disciples, listening to Jesus in John, responding to Philip’s question, promising some sort of helper, indicating it seems that he won’t be around much longer – where will that leave them? The disciples, huddled in an upper room in Acts, now facing the reality of life without Jesus, unsure, uncertain, afraid and alone, but all too aware of his parting words ordering them to continue his ministry – where shall we go?

Pentecost is really all about answering that question – where shall we go? As we get it in Acts – and we need to acknowledge that it’s not the only version of the giving of the Holy Spirit we’ve got – Pentecost presents us with a story of transformation as the somewhat motley group of left-behind disciples become the apostles and founders of what will be the Church.

I really don’t want to spend a lot of time today going into why we need to read this Acts account as a dramatisation rather than a blow by blow historical account, but suffice to say Luke was an accomplished writer and knew how to use literary techniques and motifs to spice up a tale. In reality this process of transformation from disciple to apostle, this discovering of where shall we go, was precisely that – a process. We find this in John’s gospel and the long, somewhat drawn out speeches that Jesus makes to his followers, preparing them for his departure, teaching them what they will need to carry on, forming them into what they will become. It’s a process rather than an event, and that’s a distinction I think we all need to understand.

I heard the question asked the other day, how will we know when we’re transformed? It was a budget question actually, but I thought at the time how apt it was to discussing our lives as Christians. How do we know when we’re transformed? The answer to the original question was, it’s not a one time activity, and again, the same goes for this context. Transformation isn’t something that happens and then it’s done, it’s an ongoing process that carries on continually. In other words, we only stop being transformed when we’re dead, and I suspect even then the point is debateable.

So that’s what we see dramatised in the Pentecost story – the process of transformation that leads to and continues on after this change of direction, this quantum shift, that takes the Christian movement from a small collection of believers meeting in locked rooms to the farthest corners of the world and beyond, and that is what I want to focus on for a brief time today – that shift that leads to a change of direction.

We find them throughout the history of God’s people actually. Certainly in Acts there are several which mark major turning points for the early Church. Why is that we’re not all circumcised and meeting in synagogues and avoiding shellfish? Because of a quantum shift that led the Church in a different direction than Judaism. Why are we gathered as women and men together? For the same reasons that we can meet without class distinctions or age distinctions or concerns about who’s wearing a hat and who’s not – because there were shifts in our history that changed people’s attitudes, which led to them changing their actions, which leads inevitably to a change in direction.

And I want to know what makes those shifts happen. I want to know what it takes to change the direction of an entire group of people. I want to know how it’s possible to get people to turn away from something that they’ve always taken for granted and move toward something new and unknown. And I think I know the answer, or at least the beginnings of one.

“In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.”

Peter in his speech takes these words from the prophet Joel and claims them as his own, and I want to invite us to do the same for a moment, albeit with some slight alterations.

I talked a bit about vision a couple of weeks ago and I warned those who were here at the time that I’d come back to it, so I am, and I will again – it’s going to be a bit like transformation I’m afraid, an ongoing process of going on about vision – but it’s an important thing for us to come to grips with. I asked a couple of weeks ago, why are we here, which is slightly but not altogether different from asking where shall we go? And to answer those questions, as I said then, we need to first name our vision – what is our ultimate goal, what’s the biggest of our big pictures? And what I want to say today is that a vision rarely appears out of nowhere, visions almost without fail, begin with visionaries.

“Your young men shall see visions.” Joel took the poetic option and listed a whole raft of different things all making the same point – things will begin to change when all sorts of people, young, old, rich, poor, slaves, free, all start to see things and say things – all start to have visions, to be visionaries.

Who are our visionaries? One clue is that they’re usually the ones no one’s taking very seriously. Peter and the others are dismissed as drunks and madmen. Paul goes on to be laughed at by both Christians and Jews alike. Throughout history those whom today we laud as heroes and visionaries were almost always scoffed at in their own time. Why? Because their visions didn’t match the expectations or the desires of those they shared them with.

Who are we scoffing at? Whose ideas don’t match up with ours? Who is consistently seeing things differently than most of us do? Who keeps coming up with odd, decidedly un-Anglican suggestions? Chances are, those are the sort of people who will be the visionaries amongst us.

I want to leave us this morning with some thoughts on what I consider to be the three-fold message of the Pentecost story, and the first is things will change. Transformation is constant and ongoing and change is inevitable, no matter how much we might rail against it. And we can. We can choose to fight against change, to refuse it and reject it, or we can accept it and celebrate in the fact that change is actually proof that we’re alive and growing. Whether we do or not, though, Pentecost is a reminder that change will happen regardless – the Spirit will blow where the Spirit will blow.

Secondly, that change doesn’t happen in a vacuum or in the ways we might expect. Pentecost is really just one more of a long and continuing line of examples of God doing new things through unlikely people. Peter and the others were not your most likely candidates for changing the world. They didn’t go to the right schools, or mix with the right crowds, or understand the correct principles of religion or business or whatever. It’s no wonder they were scoffed at. Yet where would we be without them? In God’s world visions begin in unlikely, and often un-likable, places. That’s the second message of Pentecost.

Thirdly, finally and most importantly, Pentecost is a graphic reminder that we don’t face all these upheavals alone. In the midst of change, in the face of challenge, whether we are the scoffer or the scoffee, even when we feel at our most vulnerable and alone, Pentecost is the promise that the Spirit is with us, even in those times when God seems so very far away.

So where shall we go? It’s still a good question, but perhaps the beginning of the answer is, wherever the Spirit leads us.

Thanks be to God.