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A Mission of Radical Dependence

Date:6/5/22

Passage: Acts 2:1-21

Speaker: Rev. Dr. Stephen Graham

The late General Omar Bradley decided to wear a business suit instead of military attire on a public flight. It would make the trip simpler to be consider a businessperson traveling home. 

After boarding the flight, he settled he began to work on some papers.  A young Army private started a conversation; “Sir, since we’re gong to be traveling together, I think it would be nice if we got to know one another.  I take it you’re a banker in the city.”  

Seeing no way to get around it, General Bradley spoke honestly, “No, I’m not a banker at all.  I happen to be General Omar Bradley, a five-star general in the United States Army, and head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon.”  And do you know what the young man had to say to that?  “Wow, that sounds like a very important job, sir.  I just hope you don’t blow it!” 

Luke’s account in Acts makes it clear that each one of us is given a very important job to fulfill.  The ones who enter the waters of baptism are reminded they are called to serve.  We do not serve to be saved, but we have been saved to serve.  On the day of Pentecost, seven weeks had gone by since Jesus had been crucified on the cross at Golgotha. The disciples and women decided to stay together to pray and to follow wherever the promised Spirit would lead them.  Before he departed, Jesus entrusted his ministry to them.

12 were gathered in one place, when a sound like the rushing of a violent wind filled the whole house.  Then, like a wildfire, the Holy Spirit, touched them all.  They were so touched that each person heard them speaking in his or her own language.  They were accused of being drunk.  Peter reported this was prophesied by. Joel.  God promised, “I will pour out my Spirit on everyone” (Acts 2:17).

Pentecost has still to run its course.  The Spirit calls us even now.  What was entrusted to them is also entrusted to us.  “You shall be my witnesses” (Acts 1:8).  We are given a very important job to do.

Ours is a mission of dynamic process.  The magic word of the Kingdom is “Go!”  There is an incredible dynamism to the rule of God.  “Go you, therefore,” is best interpreted, “As you are going!”  We are on our way.  We are in process.  Our relationship with God demands that we move at a moment’s notice with the shift and rhythms of God.  You remember that the original intention was for God’s people, those nomads called the Hebrews, to worship in a tent, a tabernacle, which could be folded up and moved to the next place, rather than in a temple made of bricks and stone.  We must remember that God dwells in us.  As we come forward to take the bread and cup today let coming forward be a reminder that we are on pilgrimage, moving forward with a dynamic God.

“I will pour out upon everyone a portion of my spirit” (v. 17a).  The promise still longs to run its course in you and in me and could I say in us just as it did in common ordinary folk on the day of Pentecost.

Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, the famous Russian writer and dissident, was in prison for his outspoken criticism of the Soviet regime.  He was sentenced to work twelve-hour days of hard labor in a concentration camp.  As if that were not enough, he was told by the doctor in the compound that he had terminal cancer.  In devastation, he said to himself, “There’s no use trying to go on.  I’m going to die soon.  Why not now?” 

He ignored his command from the guards, dropped his shovel, and crumpled down to the ground.  Then an incredible thing happened.  He felt the presence of someone next to him and looked to see an old man he had never seen before and would never see again.  The old man took a stick and drew a cross in the sand.  Without saying a word, the old man had been his witness.  That gesture turned everything around for him.  It gave him the strength he needed to withstand the awful prison brutalities of that prison until the day he was later released.

What would have happened if that unknown man had never drawn the sign of the cross for him?  Ours is a mission in dynamic process.  We are God’s witnesses to the people we meet.  God’s Spirit is being poured out even now.

Ours is a mission of prophetic confrontation.  We do not engage with Christ to have our prejudices ratified and our biases confirmed.  Just the opposite.  The gift of God’s spirit brings us crisis: a cataclysmic upheaval which changes everything and by which everything in the future is measured.  History gets turned on it head.  When are lives are confronted with the living Christ, we stand up to be counted.   Joel said, “Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy…” (v. 17b).  We are empowered to confront cultural realities, principalities and powers, which are harmful to God’s children.

Flannery O’Conner suggested, “You have to draw big pictures for a near-blind generation.”  That’s what the mission of prophetic confrontation is all about:  Sons and daughters speaking words on behalf of all God’s children.  I believe God has given to us this moment, this challenge, this adventure of faith.  Even if its difficult and anxiety producing that is a small price to pay for the excitement of pursuing God’s adventure among us.

Ours is a mission of radical dependence.  “…your young men will see visions and your old men shall dream dreams…” (v.17c).  Visions and dreams imply a source beyond us.  We are dependent on powers outside ourselves.   We are “contingent beings”—contingent on positive forces from beyond the self.  God is creator. At the deepest places we are created.  God is the only non-contingent Being.  Remembering this relationship is the beginning of wisdom.  Come to this table! We cannot live without sustenance from God.  We come together because we need the loving presence of others.  We are not in solo, but in duet, in chorus. Jesus told them and us to go two-by-two.  We are sent out and go with courage as fellow pilgrims on the way.  The gift of this table sustains us.  We really do need God, and we really do need each other. 

In 1938, Martin Niemoller was arrested by the Gestapo in Germany and sent to the concentration camp in Dachau.  Remarkably, he survived that horrid experience and was set free seven years later when the Allied Forces overcame Hitler’s Third Reich.  He said, “In Germany, the Nazis came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.  Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.  Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.”  And then he said, “They came for me, and there was no one left to speak up at all!”

I sure hope we don’t blow it.  We do church because we are on pilgrimage with God, dependent on divine power, courageous enough to confront what is evil, loving enough to dare to do life with others, and grateful enough to share with this world the goodness God has given to us.