New Wine   
Acts 2: 1-21
A Pentecost Sermon by the Reverend Odette Lockwood-Stewart  
As written...not as preached!

Epworth is entering a relationship with Nueva Guinea, a community in the Nicaraguan rain forest.  In particular, we have begun an intercambio, a mutual relationship with the teachers, students and parents of Ruben Dario High School, a school of one thousand students.  Lloyd Elliott is leading our community in this. Our first team to visit Nueva Guinea went in March.  A second will go in June.  And today, Pentecost, we begin forming Skype friendships between our two communities.

Two members of the team going in June have talked with me about having some anxiety -- because they do not speak Spanish, and they do not know if or what they can bring or do anything for the school. I don’t think that my initial response was helpful to them.  

Because I said,  “Exactly! How exciting!”  

People of Nueva Guinea have invited us to come to know them, to listen and to learn, to walk and work with them.  In order to do this, we will listen and learn – dependant upon translators – and we will be changed.  We have committed ourselves to right relationship...poco a poco... and it takes time to learn and be led.  This is especially a spiritual challenge for North Americans. So -we will resist our need to be lead, and will support their projects, learn their history, current realities, and their way of being.  This creative dislocation will keep us off-center enough to be vulnerable and useful and open to the movement of the Holy Spirit.  We don’t know where it will lead. How exciting!



In the days of Jesus, Pentecost was one of the three times a year that Jews from everywhere in the empire would gather in Jerusalem. Each person would bring a gift to God that was proportionate with the blessings they had received. It was a spring harvest festival and also became a celebration of Moses receiving the Law on Mt. Sinai.  



In Greek, the festival was known as Pentecost, meaning 50 days – 50 days after the first Sabbath following Passover.  In Hebrew it is known today as Shavout, or festival of weeks.



Many different kinds of Jewish people, all followers of Jesus, were gathered in one place that day for the festival: Different races, languages, dialects, voices, cultures, classes, geography, experiences. Suddenly, there was  --  sound, wind fire, and flaming tongues touched every person!  The whole house was filled with wind.  Every person was filled with the Spirit!  They spoke! Boldly! To strangers! The crowd was astonished and amazed as each heard and understood the message of God in their own language!  The pouring out of God’s spirit empowered a community to be community in the midst of, in spite of, or, perhaps, because of the glorious diversity of God’s creativity.



The Spirit empowered people to do amazing things... together; to understand... each other; to be recreated... as community.  It was such a remarkable and blessed “mixedness” that it drew crowds. 3000 people joined the Christian movement that day. Pentecost is considered the birthday of the Church.



The miracle of Pentecost, the birth of the church is often described in terms of speech -- many languages at once, a kind of spiritual simultaneous translation.  But Eric Law has turned this notion downside up. He said that the miracle of Pentecost is a miracle of listening.  It wasn’t amazing and astonishing that people spoke ... but that they heard.  Listening is a life transforming experience that shapes souls and communities as it makes space for the Holy Spirit to move within us.



Poet and essayist Audre Lorde wrote, “It is not our differences that divide us, it is our inability to recognize, accept and celebrate those differences.”  It is when we begin to listen enough to “recognize and accept and celebrate” a world of differences that we unleash the spirit’s power within and between us.



This is powerful stuff.  The Spirit shakes up lives, shapes community, and stimulates surprising solidarity against the grain of perceived self-interest. When we care enough to listen and to really learn from one another.  When we begin to do that we become the change we want to see. Church is not a place to hide but a place to come alive!



Spiritual teacher Howard Thurman once said, “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs, ask yourself what makes you come alive and go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

What is the Spirit doing right now in our midst? What mystery of sight and sound and spirit is about to burst into this room?  Do we really believe that it will?

I love the challenging and enticing words of Annie Dillard who wrote,

“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it?... we should all be wearing crash helmets (to church). Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”                                                       –from Teaching a Stone to Talk


Imagine the miracle of Pentecost at Epworth.  Each person bringing gifts to God proportionate to the blessings we receive. Each of us, and all of us, ever more alive. We need not travel anywhere outside our communities, outside this room, to be changed by God’s Holy Spirit. What  “languages” would we hear if we really listened to each other?  Who needs to speak?  Who needs to keep silence?  To whom do we need to listen? What winds of power and joy would roar through this loving community?


A humorist news commentator announced that critics had found Judge Sonia Soto Mayor’s fatal flaw – empathy – He warned that empathy is dangerous because it is contagious!   Listening closely enough to hear ... hearing enough to begin to understand ... understanding enough to begin to care ... caring enough to act. And suddenly out of an elemental act of listening, world-changing powers are set loose.


The Jews gathered that Pentecost day experienced all the messiness, risk, pain and joy of real birth and rebirth. Some onlookers sneered that all this bold speech, all this understanding, all this joy and excitement in the face of their pain and powerlessness was just confused peasants drinking new wine.


May our fatal flaw be enthusiasm, to be so filled the joyful and vulnerable that observers might think it was caused by spirits ... not Spirit.


Jesus didn’t say “drink new wine” ... but rather “be new wine ... burst old wineskins ... refuse to be contained by old conventions refuse to worship safety.


We don’t know where the spirit will lead us.  But especially in times of fear and uncertainty, when we do not know what to do, the Spirit will lead us.

Thanks be to God!