Chaos and the Spirit (The Day of Pentecost)

Sermon Reflections

Sermons on YouTube…

As soon as the service is over this morning, Yard Sale prep is upon us!  It’s always a wild experience!  There’s a lot to do, and I hope that many of you will be able to help out, both with the prep that needs to happen, as well as this coming Saturday during the actual event.

I’m glad we’re doing Yard Sale, but as with many of you, I go into this knowing it can be an exhausting experience.  It can be exhausting because there are hours and hours spent moving everything into place, sorting it all, and then realizing that people dropped stuff in the tent that belongs in the Youth Center and vice versa!  It can also be exhausting because the week of Yard Sale prep is often excessively hot and humid and we need to spend time outside. 

But most of all for me, it can be exhausting just looking at the chaos and the mess!  I really don’t like chaos and mess, and in most weeks, I try to make sure that things are neat and in order, both at home and at church.  On Yard Sale prep week, I have to give that up entirely! Things are just going to be chaotic. Things will be messy, in spite of our department chairs doing an outstanding job of organizing stuff.  But often for me, just looking at the chaos and the mess can be exhausting.  And even though I know it will all be back to relative normal by this time next week, when I see the chaos, I feel like all the adrenaline just drops out of my body!

And so perhaps as a corrective for me, Yard Sale Prep begins on this Sunday of Pentecost – the day when we celebrate perhaps the most messy and chaotic day in the history of the church!  The disciples are gathered in the house, where they’ve been holed up for 50 days since the Resurrection of Jesus.  And while things are still dangerous outside, inside they’ve got things pretty much under control.  The doors are probably still locked, and they’ve developed a nice, normal routine to help them along until Jesus sends the promised Holy Spirit (whatever that means)!

But then things get messy and chaotic.  The wind blows.  Tongues of fire appear!  And apparently – although Luke doesn’t tell us how – the disciples all end up outside the house in the messy and chaotic world they had sheltered themselves from.

Crowds of people they didn’t know gathered around them.  Everyone heard them speaking in their own native languages, although even the disciples didn’t know how this was happening.  And of course, there were people like me who just hated the chaos and explained it by saying these guys must all be drunk!

And yet, it was through the chaos and the mess that God was working.  In fact, as much as I often don’t like to admit it, it was necessary chaos and mess to do what God needed to do at that moment.

Sometimes, the movement of the Spirit in the Bible is the movement to bring order out of chaos.  This is the basic story of creation, when the Spirit of God moves over the waters and creates life.  But at other times, the Spirit moves in ways that creates a chaotic mess in order to move people forward.  And sometimes, part of the call of the Spirit is to live into that chaos so that important things can happen.

And that’s in fact what’s happening in today’s story.  The chaos and mess is necessary in order to:

  • Move the disciples out of their routine so that they can live into the next chapter of the story… (they can’t be apostles if they sit in the house, or only hang out with people they know)
  • Engage other people in the news of the Resurrection … (the real beginning of the story of the spread of the message of Jesus’ resurrection happens because people from “every nation” hear the news and bring it back to where they live, even before the apostles get there…)
  • Create a community that isn’t centered on one place or just a few people … (communities don’t grow if they keep acting like they’re a small band of people following Jesus around in the countryside…; or, for that matter, the story of Moses needing “70 others” – this is God’s idea because God knows Moses can’t do the next step of getting the people of Israel to the promised land by himself…)

And those are all things I need to remind myself of as I get ready for the mess and chaos of Yard Sale.  Yard Sale is about many things, but it’s also an opportunity for the Spirit of God to work in, through and among us in order to:

  • Literally move us out of the “house” of the church building, and interact with people in our community who we might otherwise not meet – this happens every year,  and like those first disciples, it does no good if we try to have an “agenda” for what we’ll do when we meet people; we simply speak and treat them as Jesus wants us to treat them, and we let the Spirit do the rest…
  • Do good for other people – the action of the Spirit doesn’t just share a message in words, but in concrete ways of help.  One of the things that’s always important is the number of folks in our community who come here and tell us they couldn’t clothe their kids if it weren’t for this yard sale… Clothing – as the folks who work it will tell you – is chaotic no matter how well they’ve organized it!  But it’s one of the finest examples of how the Spirit uses chaos to bring about good through us…
  • Help us grow as a community – when you have to work together in a chaotic environment, you learn to work together and support each other in ways that nice, orderly meetings don’t require!  But more than that, people get to know each other more deeply, and develop confidence that when we face unexpected chaotic times (because at least Yard Sale is expected!) we’ve developed the skills and relationships we need to help and support one another when things get messy at other times…

So, if you’re at all like me, you’ll be happy when the messiness and chaos of this week of Pentecost / Yard Sale is over!  But in the meantime, it’s good for us all to embrace the mess and the chaos.

And that’s because, just like those first disciple, it’s often through messiness and the chaos that the Spirit of God is working to move us out of our routines and into the future.  It’s often through messiness and chaos that the Spirit of God is working in and through us to do good for others.  And it’s often through messiness and chaos that the Spirit of God is strengthening us and binding us together to be the Risen body of Christ in the world around us.

Amen.