Listen to the Rev. Dr. Tom Yates preach this sermon in celebration of the Church’s birthday on Pentecost Sunday.
You can also read the sermon below.
Happy Birthday to us! Happy Birthday Church! In the traditions of the Christian Faith, Pentecost Sunday is observed as the commemoration of the day the Church was born. We didn’t read the accounts in the Second Chapter of Acts this morning – but most of us will remember the events that are described in those verses. The term Pentecost, meaning “the fiftieth day” is the Greek name for Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, a prominent feast in the calendar of ancient Israel celebrating the giving of the Law on Sinai. Devout Jews from all over the world gathered in Jerusalem, the Holy City, for this celebration. The Disciples were there as well. Here is the account of what happened:
“When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. 2And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.3Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. 4All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. 5Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. 6And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each.7Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? 8And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?”
Some in the crowd thought that the followers of Christ had been drinking and tried to pass off what they were seeing and hearing as simply the results of drunken revelry – but Peter set them straight and declared that what they were witnessing was instead the first signs, the birth of a new era of God’s movement among God’s people. Later it is noted that three thousand were baptized that day. Without the help of modern social media and direct mail advertising, there were three thousand new members on the first day of a new church start. No wonder we wear red and use symbols of fire to signify Pentecost. The newly born Church was on fire – in the best way possible!
The Revised Common Lectionary has two companion readings for Pentecost Sunday in Year B – the cycle we are in this year. Those are the passages from the books of the Prophet Ezekiel and the Epistle to the Romans that we read today. In these verses we also find themes of renewal, birth and new life. I hope you don’t think that I’ve been drinking too much new wine if I tell you that I am feeling hopeful that the Church – our congregation here in Hazel Dell and the larger Church of which we are a part is on the cutting edge of a renewing movement of the Spirit in our midst. Am I blowing smoke, speaking in a foreign tongue when I feel that way? – I don’t think so. But in order to have hope for what lies ahead, we have to know where we have been, what lies behind us.
The year was 587 BCE, Before Christian Era, Before Common Era. Scholars are divided as to whether or not the accounts written in Ezekiel are literally true or prophetic visions, but what we do know is that the once proud nation of God’s chosen people had become like a desert floor covered with skeletons at the bottom of Death Valley. It was like the Civil War and the battle of Gettysburg with the bodies of the fallen out there in the fields by the thousands. It was the low point, arguably the worst time in their nation’s history. All those bodies were out there, lying on the desert floor. And the whole desert, as far as the eye could see for 360 degrees, was filled with white bones of long dead young men. The Babylonians had wiped out the totality of the Israelite army. It was no contest. Babylon was a large and powerful nation-state; Israel was not. Israel was nothing; their army was nothing and they got wiped out. In 587 BCE, all the young Israelite warriors were killed. Their bodies were sprawled out on the desert sands as far as the eye could see in all directions. Those bodies were not buried but just laid there to dry and bleach in the sun. It was the sign of ultimate disrespect and contempt. No Memorial Day observances in cemeteries of shady trees and green grass with flags and flowers to mark the final resting place of those who had made the ultimate sacrifice. Only the hot sun, the desert wind, and all those bones.
The temple was destroyed. The capital city was destroyed. The people were enslaved in total poverty. Everybody was hungry or on the edge of starvation. And the Israelite people who were alive were taken as prisoners, chains around their necks, and dragged back to Babylon. The remnants of the Jewish nation had become like the bleached out skeletons strewn across the desert floor in that Valley of Death.
Is it any wonder that the Jews began lamenting to themselves? “God can’t help us. God won’t help us. There is no God. God is punishing us for our sins. We are here to rot and die in the desert. We have become like dry bones.”
There was one person left to hold the hope of God’s people – Ezekiel. The Biblical record tells us that the Lord took Ezekiel out into death valley and the Lord looked around the desert floor and the Lord asked Ezekiel: “Shall all these white bones (circle 360 degrees) covering the desert floor live again?” And Ezekiel wisely replied, “Only you know, Lord if those bones shall live again.”
Why do we need to know this gruesome and depressing story? Sounds more like an episode of “The Walking Dead” than a story for a bright sunshiny Sunday morning in spring, 2015. Don’t tune out just yet –
I have sometimes said that things I’ve seen and experienced in the 15+ years that I have worked full-time in hospital chaplaincy have provided me with a kind of layperson’s medical school education. You can learn a lot by paying attention, listening every day to doctors and nurses talk to patients and their families. I also read chart notes and participate regularly in the Interdisciplinary Team Rounds on nursing units throughout the hospital. A couple of weeks ago at PeaceHealth Southwest Washington Medical Center I saw something I had never seen before. I bring it up because it reminds me of our story from the visions of the Prophet Ezekiel.
I responded to a page from the Emergency Department to provide support for a trauma patient who had been brought in from the scene of a motor vehicle crash. The driver of the car had been pinned in when she lost control and the car rolled over. After the initial triage was completed, scans finished and the patient stabilized, the trauma surgeon in charge of the case asked if I would like to see an X-Ray image of the patient’s injured arm. “You see this length of bone down here?” The surgeon pointed to the X-ray on the screen, ‘well it is supposed to be up here” – and she pointed to a fairly sizable gap between two sections of the Humerus bone of the upper arm. Like the bones on the ground in Ezekiel’s vision – this patient’s bones were no longer connected. This is not an advertisement but we have some of the best trauma and orthopedic surgeons around and they were able to successfully reattach those broken and separated bones and repair the damage. The patient is recovering and is very thankful that it looks like she will have full use of her arm again.
I must have learned the song at church camp or in Sunday School, I don’t remember now. But I remember it. “Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones.” We had fun with it – “the hang nail bone connected to the middle finger bone, the tongue bone disconnected from the brain bone” and other such silliness that Junior High age kids sitting around a campfire are capable of imagining. Nevertheless, we got the idea – God could and did make some sense out of those piles of bones lying lifeless out there in the desert. Somehow in all of that we also learned that God loved us enough to make that happen and loved us enough to make sense of our lives as well.
And the Lord God did just that. With a great racket of rattling and creaking the skeletons began to come together again. And then sinews and muscles were added, and skin as the skeletons stood up all around. But there was no breath to make them live. “Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” Ezekiel prophesied as God commanded and the breath came into them and they lived and stood on their feet – a vast multitude. Not zombies, not the Walking Dead, but the whole nation of Israel, God’s chosen people restored, renewed, brought to new life.
Why, we might ask. For what purpose did God pull the nation of Israel back together? Out of the valley of the dry bones, came new hope, the foundation of all that was to follow in God’s story of redemption from death to a new life infused with the breath of the Spirit and on fire with the flame that does not consume but instead lights the way.
Six hundred years later, as Luke records the formation of the Christian Church in Rome and beyond, we are told that the whole creation has been groaning as though in labor pains. Waiting in hope to be adopted, but counseled to wait with patience for the Spirit to intercede for the saints according to the will of God. Just as the skeletons of ancient Israel needed the breath of the Spirit for life – so did the new Christians in Rome and beyond.
The journey of Faith has not been made on a smooth and straight road has it? Church history is littered with skeletons that somehow won’t remain buried – things have been said and done in the name of Christianity that are shameful and destructive. And it isn’t all ancient history is it? There are things going on and being said now in the name of Christianity that can’t possibly be born out of Christ’s message of love, forgiveness, and grace. There are times truly when it is embarrassing to be known as a Christian, for the culture to lump us all together, to assume that all that use the name Christian are of one mind, belief, and practice. The abuses of some in the name of Christ give us all a black eye or worse.
Our patience has been tested and we have sometimes run out of breath and the flame has flickered dangerously low. No doubt we have had skeletons in our own closets – and maybe still do. We’ve surely been disconnected and scattered, perhaps more often that we would like to admit. We are not perfect people, we don’t always live up to the promise God breathed into us back there in the desert. But my friends, we are here. We are here. The Pentecostal Church – our holy roller, tongue-speaking, spirit-filled brothers and sisters don’t have an exclusive claim on the gifts of the Spirit. They are for us all, whether we feel worthy of them, ready for them, or not.
The lessons learned around the fire pit at church camp are still true. God can still make sense of it all, God can still pull together all the scattered pieces of our individual lives and our life together as a Community of Faith. Yes there are dry bones still out there in the desert – more than we wish there were. But nonetheless – Happy Birthday Church! Happy Birthday! Wear your Red proudly if you have it! Check your pulse, catch your breath, light your fire if you need to and let’s get on with living not as those without hope – but as a body of Christ, infused with the Spirit of Pentecost every day of the year. In spite of what I have learned about anatomy at the hospital, I truly believe that the brain bone is connected to the heart bone which is in turn connected to the compassion bone and the generosity bone, and the bones of Faith, Hope, and Love.
Do you hear it? Can you feel it? Are you watching for it, waiting perhaps a bit impatiently? The Spirit is hovering, the winds are winding up, the flames are hot – Pentecost is here. From the stirrings of our own renewal, we are called to make a difference, to the person sitting closest, to those across the aisle, in the hallways and spaces of this church building, in Hazel Dell, in Vancouver, in Clark County and in all the places where the four winds of the Spirit might take us. We have important things to say, things to do. Come Holy Spirit, Come Lord Jesus, Come!
(sing it with me) “Dem Bones, Dem Bones, Dem Dry Bones – O Hear the Word of the Lord!”