The Rev. Frank Logue
King of Peace Episcopal Church
Kingsland, Georgia
June 8, 2003

We Are One in the Spirit
Acts 2:1-11 and I Corinthians 12:4-23

Pentecost. The arrival of the Holy Spirit in power to empower the frightened pack of disciples of Jesus into a brazen bunch of evangelists. Before he ascended into heaven, Jesus told his followers to stay together and wait. The Holy Spirit is coming he promised, just wait until the spirit arrives.  

Wait. Fine. But wait for what? How would they even know if the Holy Spirit had come. Jesus had already referred to the Spirit of God as the Holy Comforter. How would you know when you had the spirit? Maybe you would feel like someone had wrapped you in a cozy comforter on a cold night. Jesus had also described the Spirit in legal terms—the paraklete. A paraklete is someone who stands along side of you in court, which is why the Holy Spirit is also described as the advocate. How would you know when you had this holy attorney standing alongside of you to defend you? So they wait and pray without knowing exactly for what they are waiting and praying. 

From the fortieth day after Easter when Luke tells us Jesus ascended into heaven until the Feast of Pentecost ten days later, they waited. Pentecost, it was a Jewish festival that remembered the giving of the law on Mount Sinai. On that very day of Pentecost Jesus’ followers got an answer to their prayers. The Holy Spirit, the object of all that waiting, came with the subtlety of a bomb blast after ten days of waiting.  

The house where they waited was filled with the rush of a violent wind. A tongue of fire appeared in the air over the head of each and every one of them and all of the disciples began to speak. Words burst out of them from deep within their souls—words they had never heard before and may not have even understood even as they spoke. Suddenly this linguistically challenged group of Galileans was speaking Parthian, Mede, Egyptian and other languages from around the Mediterranean and beyond.  

The curse of the Tower of Babel was somehow reversed in one amazing outburst. At Babel the people who spoke one language and shared a common culture were divided. At Babel no one understood each other and each language group went off shaking their heads at the others who spoke such strange words. 

Now at Pentecost, the former fishermen and other followers of Jesus became interpreters par excellence. In this Babel scene played backwards, the devout Jews from Elam, Mesopatamia, Cappadocia, Pontus, Pamphylia and the like now hear the Good News of what God has done through Jesus each in their own native language.  

The Gospel is spoken not in confusing babble but with a crystal clarity that leaves the hearers cut to the quick. Before this amazing day is over, 3,000 devout Jews will be baptized as followers of Jesus, the Christ. The result of Pentecost was to take a diverse group of people and to bring them together into a common understanding of what God’s deeds of power meant to their lives. 

Of course, not everyone got the message that day. Many who heard could not come close to understanding what it all meant. The Book of Acts tells us that some assumed the Galilean group was drunk. Others just couldn’t make sense out of this Jesus story. But for those who heard and understood, they came to share a powerful connection with God and with each other.  

Sharing the same spirit of God with each other caused the people there at the birth of Christianity to see each other as brothers and sisters. Of course, brothers and sisters don’t always get along, but that relates more to the reading we have from First Corinthians today. Paul wrote to the church in Corinth about 20 years after the powerful Pentecostal experience that started the Christian Church. By this time, some folks need reminding of the oneness they share through the Spirit of God. Paul says that though they may have different spiritual gifts, their individuality makes them one all the more for their individual gifts share a common source. Paul wrote,  

“For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.” 

This is revolutionary language. Divisions that used to be all-important no longer matter at all. Whether you were a Jew or a Greek before becoming a Christian doesn’t matter. Whether you were or are a slave or a free man doesn’t matter. What matters is that we are all essentially one. This was the lesson on that first Pentecost when the people from a variety of nations all heard the one Gospel each in their own language drawing them into a new unity. 

Oneness sounds pretty good. It even looks good on paper. But in real life, oneness can get messy. It turns out that we are brothers and sisters through God’s spirit with folks we don’t even like. I want to share an example of this from Barbara Brown Taylor’s book Bread of Angels. She wrote of taking part in a Martin Luther King Day march, which was to start from her church (which is by the way the church my parents attend), Grace-Calvary Episcopal Church to Mount Zion Baptist on the opposite side of the town square in Clarkesville, Georgia.  

It was a not particularly big crowd from a variety of churches and backgrounds. As they got ready to march, they were warned that a group from the Ku Klux Klan awaited them on the square. The clergy was put out front as what she called “human air bags in case of collision.” The clergy were to absorb the impact of whatever awaited them and this gave Pastor Brown-Taylor a perfect view of what transpired. As the marchers turned the corner singing, “He’s got the whole world in his hands” men and women in white robes and pointed hats greeted them. She writes, 

They did not hide their faces, which I appreciated. They just held up their signs so we could not miss them. One featured a picture of Dr. King’s head with a rifle viewfinder zeroed in on it. “Our dream came true,” it read. “James Earl Ray made our day,” said another, and a third proclaimed, “Christ is our King.”

“He’s got you and me, brother, in his hands.” That is what we were singing as we turned the corner and walked away from them. “He’s got you and me, sister, in his hands.”  

Pastor Brown-Taylor went on to write, 

I was not scared anymore. I was mystified, because if the song was right—if what Paul said was true—then I had just walked past some members of my own body, who were as hard for me to accept as a cancer or a blocked artery. And if I did not accept them—if I let them remain separate from me the way they wanted me to—then I became one of them, one more of the people who insist that there are some people who cannot belong to the body. 

What a revelation. We are one in the Spirit. We are one in the Lord. And we may be surprised to discover that Christ can accept people as part of his own body that we don’t want to even acknowledge. Being a part of the Body of Christ is messy business. It puts us in communion with all sorts of people. Yet, how can we not be in communion with people God communes with? The way forward. The only way to get to any sort of better way of being is not to change them. But to realize that there is no them, only us. 

Pentecost. The Holy Spirit coming in awesome power as wind and flame. That first Pentecost was a great uniting event. Pentecost undid the confusion of peoples and nations. Pentecost showed that at our essence what unites us is God’s spirit and that is more important than what divides us. For no matter how unique and individual we remain, we are one in the Spirit. 

For Alleluia! Christ is risen.
The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia! 

Amen.