"The Gift of Listening" Pentecost 2017

Two wonders, two miracles are the subject of this morning’s texts. Two gifts. Luke is telling us about the first Pentecost, that day when the Holy Spirit descended upon a group of people, “Jews from every nation under heaven,” and transformed them into the Body of Christ—the church. Notice the first thing they did as the church, on the first day of the church.

They listened. And then they heard – heard a sound “from on high.” It seemed to them, the heavens opened and there was a voice. Then they spoke. They preached. They testified to the great good that God was doing among them. Jesus sent them his Holy Spirit, down from his throne in heaven. And they in turn sent up their prayers to him.

The crowd out in the street scoffed, saying, “They’re drunk!” The mob couldn’t imagine God Almighty speaking to a bunch of “ignorant and unlearned people.” Nor could the crowd imagine mere maids, janitors, teenagers, and old people preaching.

There is a dynamic here, a movement that is at the very heart of the Bible’s story about who we are and what we are doing here. God reaches down, speaks to us, enabling us to reach back up to God, to speak to God, and then to one another in witness. . That’s the movement, and it’s three-way. Downward from heaven, up from earth to God, out into the world..

You will note that same movement in today’s service. The first part of our worship is mostly our listening for God’s word. We gather and listen to Scripture. Then we listen to the sermon. So much of our Sunday worship is concerned with sitting and listening because that’s the most difficult thing for us.

“Is there any word from the Lord?” That’s the question the preacher hears you asking every time he or she enters the pulpit. Is there anything that God has to say to me today, now, here?

Some modern people say that they never hear God saying anything to them. And, some modern philosophers speak of God as Deus Absconditus, the God who hides, the God who absconds.

Maybe the problem isn’t so much that God has moved away from us but that we have removed ourselves from God. The media bombards with so many messages, so many words, sounds, and signs, so many conflicting world-views and ethical stances-- mostly in the form of advertising. Is it any wonder that we don’t hear the voice of God amid this ringing, relentless, constant cacophony?

Have you ever heard some doubter say something along the lines of:

“God has never spoken to my life. I’ve tried prayer; it’s like I’m just talking to myself. I don’t believe in God, or at least don’t believe in a God with a voice”?

A good response to that statement might be to ask the doubter,

“When’s the last time you have been in church? What spiritual disciplines do you practice?” The answers you are going to get, of course are “not recently” and “none.”

It’s like my saying,

“I always wanted to be a world-class tennis player. Of course I haven’t been on a court or picked up a racket since college. So I guess there’s really no such thing as tennis.”

God still speaks today, but not necessarily in the ways of past eras. God will speak to the people of each time in the language they’re most likely to hear and accept.

After all, how would people today react to an OT type prophet like Isaiah (Isaiah 20) taking off all his clothes and preaching naked as a sermon illustration? We’d call the cops and have him put in jail.

What would we say to a modern day Hosea taking back his faithless wife time and time again, loving her, forgiving her every time, continuing to have children with her? We’d take him aside and suggest the name of a good divorce lawyer.

For that matter, how would you or react if we unexpectedly heard the voice of God speaking from a burning bush? We’d call the nearest Mental Hospital and check ourselves in.

So on this and every Sunday morning you and I gather, sit here for a while in the silence, focus our thoughts and attention, and listen. This is one of the great gifts of Sunday worship. Yet our listening, our yearning for a word, our need to focus and be attentive to God, must not obscure the great, initial wonder behind this Sunday’s scripture.

Our God speaks. If the Bible’s testimony is as true, then our God is a relentlessly, unceasingly self-communicative Creator. There is something about this God of ours that loves to address (and to be addressed by) humanity.

Call it loquaciousness or call it love. One sure sign that two people are in love is that they long always to be with one another. More than that, they want to talk with one another – the telephone, email, whatever – hours upon hours of talk. The talk is so important because our speech is our primary way of expressing ourselves, of sharing ourselves, giving to and receiving from others.

That’s the way that God seems to be with us. At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit descends, just as the risen Christ had promised. When the wondering crowd in the street asked what all this ruckus was about, Peter made reference to the prophet Joel’s words. The prophets of Israel were one of the many ways over the centuries that God has attempted to speak to us.

Why are we so surprised to read that the disciples went out from the Upper Room at Pentecost, speaking to people in their own languages? It would be more surprising if

all those folks understood each other’s language.

We assume that English is the same for everyone. Have you ever tried to communicate with someone from Cornwell? Or Australia? Or even Mizzipi?

The English a geologist uses may be as meaningless to a social worker, as the social worker’s is to the economist, and the economist’s to a preacher. Even when you and I use the same words, those words have shifts and shades of meaning according to the hearers’ region, training, experience, and interests.

The fact is, people always hear the spirit of God in their own language, their own idiom. So the poor finds that the gospel speaks in terms of abundance. It speaks to the ill and wounded about healing; to the imprisoned about justice, to the oppressed

about liberation, to the war-weary about peace and harmony with others; to the criminal about repentance; to all of us about life as we’ve lived it.

People who are whole and well have no need to hear words of healing, and those who see the world in terms of possessions and wealth will never hear messages about the priority of relationships. Each person hears whatever that person is capable of hearing and responding to.

That’s how it was at Pentecost; that’s how it is today. Every Sunday, when we gather for worship, we gather under this promise: our God speaks. And there is another miracle here. Because God loves us enough to speak to us, we can speak to God. I don’t know which is more difficult: to hear God or to speak to God.

Back to the analogy of human lovers. One of the greatest challenges of romance is finding the words to say to another person. We’ve all heard of those painfully shy people who spend weeks, months, trying to get up the courage to speak to someone in their classroom, someone at work, someone to whom they were attracted. I heard about a young man in high school who wrote out every word of a planned telephone conversation with a girl before he dared to pick up the phone!

“Er, hello.”

“Hey”

“S’up?”

“Nothin’. S’up wit’ chu?” And so forth.

It’s not just that we’re inward directed or shy. It ‘s hard for us to find the right words.

Any kind of intimacy—especially love requires honest self-revelation. And it’s hard for us to reveal ourselves, hard to say what we want to say and how we want to say it. Why? Because much of the time, we don’t even know ourselves! And to be totally honest to anyone about ourselves—especially to God—requires our being able to be honest about ourselves to ourselves.And if this is true in our loving conversations with one another, how much more so our conversations with God?

I wonder if this isn’t one of the main reasons people have for not praying. I don’t know what to say, I don’t know which words to use. Despite the fact that God knows us through and through, the idea of being totally honest before God is scary to some of us.

The Apostle Paul tells us in Romans 8:26, that the Holy Spirit intercedes for us, giving us words that we want to speak to God. What a wonderful gift. The Holy Spirit is not only the face of God speaking to us, She is the way that God is revealed to us, and also the way that we are able to be honest with ourselves about ourselves, and thus the way

that we are enabled to speak to God. The Holy Spirit is that power, that gift of God that enables us to know ourselves, accept ourselves and ultimately to be in loving communion/conversation with God. As we sang in the great Wesley hymn this morning,

“O for a thousand tongues to sing, our loosened tongues employ.”

One of the kindest compliments I ever get is when someone of you say that something I said in worship “spoke to you”. One of the most telling experiences I have is when you complain that I’m “picking on you” in my sermon. When I hear that particular criticism, my only thought is “How egotistical you are, that you think I’d waste an entire sermon on you!!” The truth is that I never have anyone particular in mind when I compose a sermon. If I, or any pastor ever find the right words to say something to your heart in a sermon, it’s not because I necessarily had you in mind.

It’s not because I have the spiritual gift of discernment. Nor is it because I went to a good seminary. It’s not even because I pray enough, or have the correct Theology, or the correct understanding of the Bible. It’s because God’s Spirit gave me the words. And you. If you ever hear anything that either touches you or challenges you in a sermon, despite all of the perfectly good reasons why you might not, it’s because God is giving you the gift of listening.

That’s the reason why, in church, or reading the Bible, you come to a familiar passage and think to yourself: “Great, First Corinthians 13. Here we go again.” But then, sometimes in the listening or in the reading, a mini-miracle occurs--some word, some phrase jumps out at you, grabs you by the ears, and claims your attention. That’s the Holy Spirit.

A reporter once asked a diplomat,

“What is your goal in your current diplomatic efforts?”

“To get people to the table to talk,” he replied.

“Is that all?” the reporter persisted.

“Well, that’s enough,” said the diplomat. “If we can just get people to talk and to listen, about 90 percent of our diplomacy is accomplished. The rest is easy after that.”

Christianity is a “revealed religion,” which is a fancy way of saying that you don’t “get it,” it “gets you.” You can’t intellectually decide to follow Jesus, he has to be given to you. It must come from “on high.” The best Bible study, the best listening to sermons is a form of prayer, that humble listening, that waiting on the gift of God.

And today, Pentecost, is the day when we gather to celebrate that relationship, to give thanks to God for being so communicative, so talkative, so lovingly, self-revealingly conversational. It is also the day that we find the words to praise God as we ought, to speak to God in words and music that are more beautiful than we ourselves could devise so that God might speak to us words more wonderful than we could devise.

All this, all of these things are pure gift—from the Holy Spirit. So listen up! Amen.