Water Falls From our Mouths

Acts 2: 1-21

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all gathered together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.

“When you hear a train coming, and there’s no tracks, run for cover.” As a child of the Midwest, I’d often hear these words of warning concerning the presence of a tornado. Maybe we should warn people in a similar way concerning the presence of the Holy Spirit when they come to church… Or not.

The Spirit of God is not the possession of the church. It blows where it will, loves novelty, and is not as reverent of tradition as we are. It is often offense, a dissonant Spirit traveling through the voices of people we are suspicious of- in the voice of the foreigner, or the odd stranger. Maybe the person’s not even a Christian, at least not in an orthodox sense. Sometimes the religious outsider is the most receptive to the Spirit, and sees with freshness and originality the truths we take for granted. Even when the outsider discourse of the ‘spiritual, not religious’ variety gets stale, the Spirit will seize a different kind of outsider to revel it’s power.

The Holy Spirit transcends sterile language systems. It travels freely from one thread of discourse to another. When one language game becomes rote, the Spirit hops to another box car. When one form of discourse becomes too ideologically rigid, the Spirit will blow upon another, or invent a whole new form of discourse.

The Spirit comes to us when we least except, in a serendipitous encounter, speaking a surprising word that lifts us higher than ourselves. Higher and higher, God’s love for us comes with a clarity that lets us know it’s been there all along. We feel miraculously freed from the burden of our self-concern. But then when even the serendipitous becomes formulaic, the Spirit returns back to the church and works in the most ordinary words of the preacher. So maybe that tornado warning should be leveled after all.

Then with a mix of awe and dread and inspiration we stand with Peter, and find our own voice in the muck. And we take a deep breath, and open our mouth, and speak. We’re not as eloquent as we’d hoped, but the Spirit is in there.

The Spirit doesn’t nuance. It is never ambiguous, because the language of God’s love is never ambiguous. It’s as loud and clear as the roar of a train.