How Can I Keep from Singing?

First Congregational Church in Auburn UCC, May19, 2024, Pentecost Sunday

Acts 2:1-21:  “They’re speaking our languages, describing God’s mighty works!”

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our Rock and our Redeemer.  Amen.

In the story of Pentecost, we hear how the Spirit of God came upon the gathered believers.  You can just imagine the chaos as those folks, perhaps gathered just as we gather, quietly chatting with their neighbors, gradually realized that others were getting more and more excited, and quickly it all sounded incoherent; people were now speaking other languages, all describing God’s mighty works.

It was so chaotic that people began to mutter that the speakers were drunk.  Not so, said Peter; it’s only 9:30 in the morning.   Rather, this is the sign that God is doing great things, that there’s been a radical change and something new is happening.

That was then; this is now.

Is this just another historical story? Is it only about something that happened when the believers held their first big gathering after the resurrection?  Whatever it was then, what does it mean now?

Is the Holy Spirit of God still active in our churches today?  Because, let’s be clear, if a group of people came here this morning and started shouting in excitement, so that we thought they were rambling in German or Korean, or Navajo, and that maybe, probably they were total drunks, we would be both shocked and offended.  As, I’d bet, folks felt on that first day.

If that’s what the manifestation of God’s Holy Spirit always looks like…. well, I’m not so sure we would be able to deal with it.  Fortunately, this isn’t the usual way we experience the Holy Spirit – unless, maybe, we go off to Association or Conference Annual Meeting or to our national General Synod.  But here, in this church, here we experience the Spirit in homier ways.

We know the Spirit in more home-made ways.  Instead of loud, boisterous assemblies, we see the Spirit in action when one or another of us is surrounded with love in a time of need.  We experience the Spirit, when we gather around tables at Coffee Hour.  We participate in the Spirit’s work when we sing together.

The key signs of the Spirit in action in our fellowship are these – that we care for one another, that we reach out in love to serve our community, that we praise God together in song, and that we are ready for something amazing to happen.

We care for one another.  Over and over, I hear that our church is known for the love we show one another.  We care, we reach out in friendship, we support and love.  This love is one of the essential qualities of a church, and we have it in abundance.

Pentecost reminds us how important it is that we love one another.  It reminds us that there is a time when that is not true – that in our world today, it is not always easy to know where we are truly welcome, much less loved.  At its best, our church provides a breathing space where we can reach across the divisions which so mar our world.  At our best, this is a place where it is safe to admit our pain and know that others will care.  This trust is one of the fruits of God’s Holy Spirit.

God’s Holy Spirit calls us to reach out beyond the community of people we know , to serve the world beyond our doors.  You’ll remember that when Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan, he wanted us to know that the people outside, the strangers, those with whom we differ, they are our neighbors.  Our neighbors are not just those people whose homes and businesses surround this building, not just the current inhabitants of Auburn, not even just the folks in Worcester who struggle to make a stable life in difficult times.  Our neighbors are the whole of the world.

God’s Holy Spirit calls us to worship God regularly, joyfully and prayerfully.  You know, what we do here on Sunday morning, is done to please God, to respond to the call of the Spirit.  Sure, we want to enjoy what we’re doing – God does not want us to be gloomy worshippers!!  But the first purpose of our time together is praising God.

You can often see that purpose in the music we sing, in our hymns.  We opened today with “Come, O Spirit, Dwell Among Us”.  If our worship is about the Holy Spirit, then it makes good sense to begin with a song which calls that Spirit to be here with us.  And you may have noted, the words of the hymns we sing teach us about the substance of our faith.  And after the sermon, we’ll sing “How Can I Keep From Singing?”, because our common song together is the powerful engine of our work together.

I was raised in a denomination which feared the power of music, which thought singing led us astray.  It was when I joined the United Church of Christ that I realized that belief was both true and false.  Music has power, singing together makes us one body in ways that are hard to understand until we’ve experience it.  But that  power is not inevitably bad; in fact, in this place it is the voice of God speaking to us.  It is in music and song that we are so often drawn in new ways. 

Song helps set the tone of the service – so sometimes the music is somber, sometimes it’s really upbeat.  Always it is intended to help convey the truth of the Gospel to all of us.

All of these things help prepare us for the final tasks of the Spirit – to open us to that which is part of our evolving world. Now it’s part of the human condition to always be best ready for the last big thing.  

Have you ever heard of the Maginot Line?  It’s a system of forts and defenses that the French built along the French-German border in the 1930s.  Building on their experiences in World War I, they planned for a future invasion, expecting that it would run about the same as the one in World War I.  And they expected that people would move in the same ways; they paid no attention to the advances in military equipment.  So, when Hitler invaded France at the beginning of World War II, the Germans simply drove their powerful tanks around the Maginot Line; they went through Belgium, and the Maginot Line turned out to be useless.  

The Holy Spirit calls us to constantly pay attention, to know when we’re living in yesterday and when we’re paying attention to tomorrow.  It’s about asking questions – what does it mean that we are, as a people, engaged in thinking through how the structures of our society reflect our assumptions about people?  Do we define other people through our own assumptions and beliefs or is it ok that they have different assumptions and conclusions?  Unless, of course, they support the Yankees? 

Last week, for instance, a football player gave a Commencement Address in which he declared that women should not have careers.  He belongs to a conservative Christianity which teaches that there is a line of authority which governs the world, where authority comes from God to men, and then men exert their authority over women.  Women only have authority over their children, and only to the extent that their husbands allow.

Women, in their minds, are subordinate to men – all men, not just their husbands.  For these men, it’s impossible to imagine a woman serving as a police officer or serving in the military, because then women would have to exert authority over a man, and that destroys the femininity of women and the masculinity of men.  Some of these men believe that it is immoral for women to divorce an abusive husband.

What does it mean in our world today that these kinds of ideas are being promoted?  What does it mean that we disagree with them, completely and absolutely?  We believe women and men, all people, are made in the image of God, that all people have equal authority and agency.   How does that difference affect our world?

The gift of the Holy Spirit, which we celebrate today is the guidance of God to discuss and discern, to be able to see what is needed and how we might go about meeting that need.

Today we celebrate that gift of the Spirit – the Spirit which teaches us to love, joins us in worship, calls us to service, makes our gatherings into church.  Let us continue to abide in that Spirit, now and always.

Amen.

© 2024, Virginia H. Child