Quiet Pentecosts

A Story-sermon Preached by

The Rev. Paul Debenport

May 31, 2009

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Hear God’s Word from Acts 2: 1—4

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were altogether in one place.  And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a mighty wind, and it filled the entire house

where they were sitting.  Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a

tongue rested on each of them.  All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit

and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

And from today’s lectionary Gospel lessons from John 15: 26—27

and 16: 7, 13—14

“When the Advocate [Helper] comes, whom I will send to you from the Father,

the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf. 

You also are to testify because you have been with me from the beginning.”

“Nevertheless I tell you the truth:  it is to you advantage that I go away,

for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you, but if I go,

I will send him to you.  … When the Spirit of truth comes, he will

guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own,

but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you

the things that are to come.  He will glorify me, because he

will take what is mine and declare it to you.”

The Word of the Lord.  Thanks be to God.

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            Stories.  The stories of our lives, of our ancestors’, and even of other peoples’ experiences are how we learn and pass on the truth of our lives.  Much of the Bible contains our faith ancestors’ stories with God and each other—as in the narratives we’ve heard this morning.  Theological abstraction is important and helpful, but it’s the faith stories that deeply touch our hearts.

            It took me a long time to learn that about sermons.  Some sermons need to be intellectual and doctrinal, but it’s the stories that carry the freight and, most often, it’s only the stories that we remember.  Today’s sermon is 95% stories.  The first story is mine, the remaining other peoples’.  All can help us get a better connection with God’s good gift of the Holy Spirit.

            When I was about 14, I began to have this sense that I was being called to be a minister.  It was very vague and even troubling, since I didn’t at all want to be the goody-goody, judgmental stereotype I had of a minister.  But it was also persistent.  One issue I had was that I thought I was supposed to have had some kind of dramatic spiritual experience, like the original Pentecost story, or like the Apostle Paul’s on the road to Damascus.  Being raised Presbyterian and not Pentecostal, I’m not quite sure where I got this idea, but I did.  Obviously, I pursued my sense of calling, though I still was troubled by a lack of some dramatic, no-room-for-ambiguity, experience.  In my first church, the Senior Pastor, Sam Lanham, Sr., had come from the opposite background.  Raised charismatic Baptist in Waco Texas, he had had a dramatic, Road to Damascus experience that changed the course of his life in a very unusual way.  Already a successful trial attorney and adjunct law professor, and husband and father, his experience sent him to away from his Baptist upbringing and to Presbyterian Seminary and the Presbyterian Church.  When I “confessed” to Sam my envy of his clear-cut, no-doubt-about-it experience, he said something like, “Oh, Paul, the Lord just uses the dramatic stuff for those of us too stubborn to heed the Spirit’s quieter calls.  The Spirit’s been with you all along.”  Sam’s simple statement made all the difference in the world for me.  It was the truth of quiet Pentecost.

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            Today’s second story comes from Phil Jackson, the coach of the Lakers, and a child of the modern Pentecostal movement.  Jackson’s faith story is his book, Sacred Hoops: Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior.  The son of two Pentecostal ministers, he describes his mother as being “as passionate about spirituality as anyone I’ve ever met….  For her, the Bible was God’s prophetic book…and it predicted that time was running out….”  He described his father as a stern disciplinarian, a literalist of the King James variety, but a gentle, caring man nonetheless.  Jackson talks about being raised with a sense of fear at the heart of his experience of faith, a fear that the end of the world would come before he himself was saved.  According to the Pentecostal tradition, salvation depends on your having an experience like that first Pentecost—literally just like it. 

            When Jackson reached the appropriate age when he was supposed to have his literal Pentecostal experience, however, nothing happened.  He writes:  “It was agonizing.  I worked hard for the next two or three years, praying long hours and `tarrying in the Spirit’ after services.  Still, nothing.  I felt like a failure, and yet I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong.  So rather than reject the faith outright, I avoided the issue.  I dodged services and started working on my jump shot.”

But when it finally came, surprisingly, it came quietly.  He describes the turning point this way:  “On one of the Knicks’ road trips, I picked up a copy of William James’ The Variety of Religious Experience….  I couldn’t put it down.  Reading these stories, it was clear that mystical experience didn’t have to be a big production.  It didn’t require hallucinogenic drugs or a major Pentecostal-style catharsis.  It could be as uneventful as a moment of reflection.  When I finished the book,” he concluded, “I put it down, said a prayer and then experienced a quiet feeling of inner peace.  This was the experience I had longed for as a teenager.”1.

            So for both Phil Jackson and me, the Holy Spirit was there when we didn’t even know or recognize it.  And I now know that for most people, the Holy Spirit comes like Jesus described in today’s lessons, as “the Spirit of Truth,” as “Advocate,” “Helper,” who gently “guides us into the truth.”  Most often, as my mentor Sam emphasized, Spirit comes as a quiet Pentecost, gently edging its way to us.

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            But not always.  Sometimes it comes through a traumatic, even harsh experience.

Which leads into my last story, an extended metaphor, really, which comes from The Rev. Michael Lindvall, with whom I studied last year, and who said this: 

            “I love sailing, and we keep a sailboat up in the Pentwater of Lake Michigan, where the wind blows hard most of the summer, straight across the lake out of the southwest.  Pentwater harbor is a snug little refuge separated from the big lake by a narrow channel with two stone jetties at the end and a stubby red lighthouse at the tip of the northerly one.

            “To get a sailboat out of the harbor and into the big lake, you almost have to use what sailors call `an auxiliary.’  ‘Auxiliary’ is a word that sailors use to avoid saying ‘engine.’  Our old boat celebrates her thirtieth birthday this summer.  Her auxiliary is also thirty years old, a Universal Marine Atomic Four, which always starts, runs well enough, but, well … it’s a little noisy and it vibrates and it belches carbon deposits every few days.  But the auxiliary is the only way to get through the channel out to the big lake, so every sail starts with a period of what engineers call ‘noise, vibration and harshness.’”

            Hold that picture for a moment.  Think of a time in your life that started with “noise, vibration, even harshness.”  Perhaps you didn’t think you’d get through it; perhaps you felt abandoned by God—Spiritless—but it did eventually move you to a steadier, more confident and freer place.  Think for a moment….

            Let’s finish on Lake Michigan, as Lindvall’s concludes:  “I told you about the noisy auxiliary engine that I need to get the sailboat out of the channel, how it disturbs the peace and shoves the boat along just barely fast enough.  Well, on every sail there comes this lovely moment a few hundred yards past the breakwater into the lake when you reach down and twist the old brass key and turn the old Atomic Four off.  You have just set the sails; the boat is still nose to the wind so they’re fluffing wildly.  You flip the engine off and pull the tiller so that the wind slowly fills the sails.  And as the wind fills the sails, she just comes alive.  She heals, and leaps forward silently.  Everything is suddenly steady and firm.  She becomes what she was made to be.  She dances through those waves building all the way from Milwaukee, moving faster and fast, more surely, more confidently, and freer than ever.”2.

Amen.