Taylor Mertins

The theologian Willie Jennings says, “This is the beginning of a community broken open by the sheer act of God, and we are still yet to comprehend the extent to which God acts and is acting to break us open.”

This is important. It’s important because, despite all of our best efforts, we tend to consider Pentecost only in the past tense, something that happened way back when never to happen again. It’s all just a little too perfect isn't it? I mean, a whole group of individuals living together in harmony, and no one has any need?

Have you ever met people before? This doesn’t work.

Or what about thousands getting added from just one sermon. It’s impossible. And that’s not even mentioning the miracle of speaking new languages!

This is such a beguiling image: twelve disciples, with no exceptional credentials, no advanced degrees, no capital resources to draw upon, all standing in front of the crowds, standing in front of the world, with nothing more than a message, nothing more than a story.

Who would believe such a remarkable word coming from such unremarkable witnesses?

Well, if it were up to them alone it would be impossible. But that’s the power of the Pentecost story because it’s not all up to them, and it’s not all up to us. The Spirit makes the impossible possible, giving life to the dead and bringing into existence the things that do not exist.

The truth, the staggering out of the upper room truth of Pentecost, is that the fire that landed in Jerusalem is still blazing through the church today.

Have you listened to the birds recently? Or considered the lilies? Jesus asks us to do so not just because it’s nice, and it is nice, but it also helps to give us perspective. It opens our eyes to something more than whatever is currently weighing us down.

The Gospel is a promise. Jesus cares about you, desires your welfare and your gladness. You can give him your worries, by prayer, by exhaustion, by friendship, by worship, by any and all means necessary because he cares for you.

Jesus is for you and with you no matter what.

If you’ve ever been made to think you’re somehow not worthy of Jesus’ attention or affection, if the world has ever worked to diminish you or belittle you, just remember that the accusation lobbed against Jesus the most is that he spent too much time with the wrong people.

People just like you and me. Jesus is the friend of sinners and the Savior of the world. There is no one outside the power of his grace, because Jesus is never done with anyone...

Forming the church, a community that is sustained by the wily Lord named Jesus, is as challenging as any endeavor we will encounter. It looks like a group of people who willfully gather with nearly nothing in common save for the fact that Jesus calls us his friends. It looks like people who are willing to pray for things they wouldn’t pray for on their own, like our enemies. It looks like people who believe that water is thicker than blood, that we are bound to one another in baptism in a way that is somehow more concrete than with the people who are part of our family trees. It looks like people who believe their allegiance is first and foremost to Jesus, not a country, not a flag, and not a holiday...

For God’s sake, what do you suppose we are going to be, you and I? When we grow up?

That may fall a bit flat, of course. Some of us here are no longer children, though we may act like it online. Surely many of us have all of our growing up behind us. We’re responsible, committed, and decisive. We’ve already seen enough to know we’ve seen enough. Perhaps the question isn’t “What are we going to do?”, but “What are we now and how well are we doing it?”

Maybe the time has come for a performance review? Whether we’re doctors, drivers, or designers; electricians, pediatricians, or morticians; teachers, preachers, or in-betweeners; recently hired, fired, or retired; we all like to think that, one way or another, we’ve already figured it all out and we just have to keep doing what we’re doing they way we’re doing it.

And yet, this ancient apostle, the right hand man of the Son of Man, the paradoxical Peter pens an epistle to the likes of those who follow Jesus then, now, and forever. And he has the nerve to call us babies.

Like little infants, long for the spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up to salvation; for you have tasted the kindness of the Lord.

In other words, no one’s story is finished. It does not matter how old or young you are, what you’ve done or left undone, God isn’t done with you because God is never done with anyone, and we all have some growing up to do...

The apostle Peter pens an epistle to the early church in large part because they are trying to navigate what it means to be faithful and political in the world. They are contending against the Powers and Principalities and Politics of their day and they want to know which way to go.

In chapter 2 Peter is in the middle of exhorting the faithful community to resist the empire by imitating the Lord who became Servant of all. He writes of how servants and slaves are free, right now, to imitate the cruciform way of Jesus. He describes the call to remember that Jesus is Lord and Caesar is not.

Peter is preaching politics. A politics that was preached to him by Jesus.

“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

What could be more political than that?

And so, having received a particular political witness, Peter punctuates his epistle with the claim that the church will have to live as strangers in a strange land. In order to follow Jesus they/we will necessarily look very different from the world...

Paul and Silas travel to Thessalonica and they proclaim the Good News of the Gospel to any who will listen. But a band of ruffians, that’s the Greek for you, a band of ruffians form a mob and they send the city into an uproar. They try to find Paul and Silas in order to bring them before the authorities, and when they can’t find them they drag some other believers before the city rulers and they say, “The people who have been turning the world upside down have come to our city!”

Before the church was called the church, and before Christians were called Christians, the first descriptor that the world used to describe those people was, “World-Turners.”

Yes, they will know we are Christians by our love, as the old song goes. But they will also know we are Christians because we turn the world upside down.

In other words, the church is a revolution...

Embarrassment is a unexplored virtue.

The truth about the church is that we never really know what we’re walking into and we never really know who God is going to drag through the door. And sometimes the slides don’t work, or the microphone feeds back, or the sermon falls flat, but at least it’s real.

Sometimes we sit next to someone who gets on our nerves, or the prayers hint at a reality we’re not entirely sure about, or we shake a sweaty hand during the passing of the peace, but at least we’re actually spending time with actual people.

Sometimes we cry and we don’t know why, or we ache for something we can’t quite describe, or we feel weary about everything we’re carrying, but at least we have a God who refuses to be anything other than God with us.

Be strange, Peter says, because God is strange. Only God would come up with an idea for something like the church, only God would give without ever expecting much of anything in return, only God would be willing to die so that we can live.

Our faith gives us the courage to do embarrassing things because our faith isn’t in us, its in Jesus. When you know someone loves you no matter how bad your dancing turns out to be, or how much you cry at the weirdest things, or how much you laugh at jokes that aren’t really that funny, well then you know what it means to be free.

That’s the love that God has for you, it’s more precious than gold and it’s imperishable, undefiled, and unfading. You are loved so much that you can go out there and make a fool of yourself. Feel that feeling of faithful embarrassment because everything that matters is on the other side of that.

Easter is a promise. It is a promise that you are worthy of love and that nothing can ever separate you from the love of God in Jesus, not even death.

Jesus is a revolutionary. It’s just a different revolution than anyone thought it would be. He’s not a lion who will supplant violence with more violence. He’s just the lamb, the lamb of God who comes to take away the sins of the world...

The great Robert Farrar Capon believed that the greatest challenge facing the church wasn’t questions about the afterlife but rather our present dullness. In short, he believed we lost our astonishment.

He said that the Good News preached in churches is no longer life-changing, only after-life changing. And yes, the promise is that one day God will breathe life into our old dry bones, but the promise is also that God is doing it right now.

The reason the Gospel took hold after Easter is because the earliest Christians lived according to the future in the present, the promise that dry bones can live now and later. Those disciples refused to settle for anything dry. The Power and the Principalities, particularly those that perpetrate injustice, tried to stop the Gospel because in threatened to upend the status quo. But God breathed new life into the church.

Then and now Christians are those whose hearts are on fire, who are continually astonished by what God did and does, and have witnessed their own bones be given new life. Christians are just people who have go down into and come out of the pit.