What We Celebrate
Acts 2:1-21
Pentecost
4 June 2006
Stacey Simpson Duke
Happy Birthday!
I have to admit that those two little words spark a mixture of emotions
in me. The balance of those emotions seems to shift for me with
each passing year, as I imagine it does for most people. How you
receive the words “happy birthday” depends a lot on how old you are.
For children, birthdays are nothing but good news. The birthday
itself is a happy event – a cake, a party, gifts. And what it
represents is happy too – all children seem eager to get older.
Children lean towards the future in a way that the rest of us are not
completely able to do. I remember my anticipation the night
before I turned 12. It so happened that my birthday that year
also fell on the last day of school – an almost too wonderful
convergence. My excitement the night before such a big day had me
dancing and singing in my bed in the dark, until my father came to tell
me to go to sleep.
Can you remember that kind of happy impatience? It would sit
there somewhere between your heart and your gut, coiled like a spring,
getting tighter and tighter, until you thought you might burst.
It was maddening and magnificent at the same time.
I can remember how perplexed I used to be by the fact that adults did
not seem to look forward to their special day in the same way. “I
don’t want a fuss,” I would overhear a grown-up say. Or “I really
don’t feel like celebrating the fact that I’m getting older.” I
was too young to understand then the pathos in a birthday – that each
celebration is just another step closer to the grave. Happy
birthday, indeed.
These days, though, what strikes me most about birthdays is not
primarily the pathos – though that is definitely there – nor that tight
coil of anticipation – though I’ve got enough kid in me still that that
is there, too. What strikes me most is that on our birthday, what
we celebrate is something that we ourselves did not do.
Isn’t it funny that on a person’s birthday, we gather around that
person and sing, and clap, and give them gifts, and just generally
treat them nicely, and make a big to-do, when in fact it was someone
else who made the choice and did the work and all they did was just get
born. What we celebrate is that something happened to them and
something happened for them. What we celebrate is that a choice
was made on their behalf, the gift of life was given to them and with
each passing year it keeps being given. What we celebrate is not
an achievement, but a miracle. And who we celebrate is the
recipient, not the doer.
This goes against our cultural tendencies – tendencies that focus on
achievement, progress, accomplishment. We are a society of
self-made men and women, taught that we make our own reality – whatever
good happens is from sheer hard work, whatever bad happens is from our
own dumb choices. So it is a little bit revolutionary to set
aside a day each year to celebrate something good that we ourselves did
not do, something good that just happened to us.
It is all the more remarkable that what we celebrate is something we
cannot even remember for ourselves. Others must remember it for
us, and tell us the story. I once knew a professor who, every
year on her daughter’s birthday, would call her daughter up and tell
her again the story of her birth. The phone would ring, the
daughter would pick it up, and on the other end would be the voice she
had known from the womb, and it would begin, “On the day you were
born....” and the daughter would settle in to hear in vivid detail how
she entered the world. We who were the daughter’s friends would
joke that she must get tired of hearing the same story every year, but
how could a person ever get tired of hearing, in loving detail, the
particulars of his or her own miracle of being?
This morning, we have heard the same story. Not of our individual
birthdays, but of our shared one – Pentecost, the church’s birthday,
which we celebrate today. “On the day you were born….” Luke
begins. And he tells us the miracle of our birth – how a ragtag
group of people like you and me came to become God’s own people, the
church. And not just people like you and me, but actually you and
me. We don’t remember it, of course, but it was our birth
too. By grace, we were all there. “On the day you were
born,” Luke tell us, “we were all together in one room. And
suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent
wind, and it filled the entire house. Divided tongues, as of
fire, appeared, and a tongue rested on each one of us. And we
were all filled with the Holy Spirit and we all began to speak in other
languages, as the Spirit enabled us.”
Every year at this time, he tells us the story again, with loving
attention to all the peculiar details, the story of the singular event
of our coming into existence. And the miracle of this birth is no
less than that of our individual births – it was not our own doing, not
our own choosing, that made it so. What we celebrate is what has
happened to us and for us.
So what exactly did happen that day? What is it that we celebrate?
The easy answer is to say that on Pentecost we celebrate the Holy
Spirit being poured out onto God’s people and making us into the
church, filling us with power and courage, breaking down walls, sending
us out into the world to proclaim good news. The more truthful
answer is to say that we don’t really celebrate that all that much
because we aren’t sure it is a gift we want. Let the Pentecostals
have the Spirit, we would rather get by with common sense and
decorum. We will talk about God some, and Jesus a little bit, but
to talk about a Spirit that descends on us, fills us, empowers us,
guides us, moves us, and uses us – well, let’s don’t get carried away
now.
But it is the Holy Spirit – its fearsome power, its unbounded grace –
that makes us who we are, the church. If we are only here to do
our own work, to carry out our own plans, to execute the programs we
ourselves have thought up, then we may be a very good social
institution, or we may make a mighty fine charitable organization, but
we are not the church. What makes us the church is the Holy
Spirit poured out on us and working in is and moving through us.
Some people find it difficult to believe that God’s own being would be
born in the form a little baby in Nazareth. I think it is more
incredible that God would choose to be born in us, the church, a
collection of flawed, disbelieving, fearful folks if there ever was
one. But this is the stunning claim of our birthday story: that
God’s own being was born in us that day, and remains in us still.
That in us, the church, God’s very presence is made real.
Do you believe that? Do you believe that God is a tangible
presence, actually available for us to experience as individuals and as
a congregation? Do you believe that God seeks to guide us and
then to empower us to follow that guidance? Do you believe that,
if we are alive to God’s purposes, God will actually use us to do far
more than we could ask or imagine?
Perhaps if this room were suddenly filled with a violent wind, we could
believe. Or perhaps if fire began licking the walls and dancing
over our heads. Or maybe if all barriers to communication
suddenly dropped and we each spoke each other’s language and could all
be understood. Perhaps then we could believe, and be open, and be
filled, and be used.
Or maybe not. 2000-something birthdays later, we are tired, and
cynical, and not all that inclined to be open to new directions or
fresh insights, let alone to dramatic signs and wonders. We
aren’t sure we want to be empowered, not if it means, like it did for
those first Christians, that people are going to think we’re either
crazy or drunk. And not if it means, like it did for those first
Christians, that it might cost us something – like our
self-determination. So the question is, do we want to be
comfortable, reasonable, and self-directed, or do we want to be God’s
church?
On our birthday, Luke reminds us of who we are meant to be: God’s
people, and God’s people only – not our own; filled with God’s actual
being and God’s own power; sent to do God’s good work of love. It
is an astonishing calling, and a miraculous gift. And though we
only celebrate it once a year, the truth is that every day can be the
church’s birthday if we keep opening ourselves to the surprising gifts
of the Spirit.
---
I had the privilege this week of witnessing two young boys enjoy the
experience of being celebrated simply because they were born, simply
because they are alive. The wonder on their faces, the joy, the
delight, the surprise. They embraced every bit of celebration
that was poured out on them, without reservation or defense.
Everything they were told to do – here, open a present; hey, blow out
these candles; now, here’s a song for you! – everything they were told
to do, they simply trusted and they did, and with gusto.
What would life look like if we, as individual Christians, and as First
Baptist Church, and as part of God’s holy universal church, what would
it look like if we could be awake to such a miracle as the birth of
God’s Spirit in us? What if we listened for what the Spirit would
tell us, and simply trusted it, and did it with gusto, without
reservation or defense? What if we sparkled like children on a
birthday that was only good news, and leaned forward towards our shared
future with nothing but anticipation and hope? What if?
The birthday table is set. No cake here, but all we need – a cup,
some bread, each other, Christ the Host, and God’s Holy Spirit hovering
over us, waiting to be born in us again and again.
