Humor me please, and repeat after me. Merry Christmas! (The congregation responds: "Merry Christmas!")
Thank you. Now, I know it's not Christmas. Today is the feast of Pentecost, which is just like Christmas, except it's different. Like Christmas, Pentecost is one of the three major feasts in the church year. There's Christmas, Pentecost, and Easter, and each of the three feasts is trying to get us to understand something. If we got just a glimpse of this “something,” it would transform our lives completely.
Christmas is the festival where we celebrate God coming to be with us in Jesus. This occurs in such a way that if we begin to get a glimpse of it, we will realize that God is not this distant reality, but rather that God is something that is present in our world right now. God is something that was present in Jesus in this remarkable and spectacular way, enlivening him through the Spirit.
Pentecost is like that, except it's different. The feast of Pentecost was originally a Jewish feast which was held 50 days after the Passover, so for us, 50 days after Easter, we celebrate Pentecost. On the first Pentecost, the disciples are clustered in a room. God's Spirit comes and fills them, and they are alive with God's Spirit in them. They become, if you will, just like Jesus. They are fully human, and they are also fully embodied by God's Spirit. Before Pentecost, there was just one Jesus. And then all of a sudden, all of these other people are filled with God's Spirit, and they become, Jesii. So the room becomes filled with all these Jesii, these people who were both human and Divine, all at the same time. And then Jesus sends them out into the world to carry that Spirit out with them.
At Christmas we celebrate the birth of just one person who is filled with God, but at Pentecost, we celebrate all of our births as being people filled with God. All of a sudden, on this feast of Pentecost, Jerusalem gets filled with all of these Jesuses. And down through the ages, the world becomes full of all of these people who are enlivened by the Spirit like Jesus was.
It helps, when we are talking about these ancient stories, to come up with a contemporary analogy or metaphor or illustration, that helps us to see this in our own lives. I'm sure many of you have already made the connection between this ancient Pentecost story and the last episode of the TV series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Just in case there are some of you who didn't make the connection yet, or perhaps some of you who haven't seen Buffy the Vampire Slayer, let me lay it out for you.
In the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in that mythic vampire-filled world, in every generation a young woman is chosen and given special mystical powers. With these powers she is to battle evil, and evil happens in the form of vampires. In our generation, it's Buffy who is given these mystical powers, with which she can do amazing things and fight vampires. She has this ragtag band of friends, who don't have the powers she has, but who are faithful and cunning, and are her sidekicks. Every week they fight a new battle with vampires and they do amazingly well.
Now, as you may have guessed, the life expectancy of the vampire slayer is rather short, because apparently killing vampires is a risky business. Therefore, in the mythic world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, there are people all over the world who are recruiting the next potential vampire slayers. These people go all over the world looking for young women who are particularly strong-willed, who are good candidates for becoming a vampire slayer. They start training these candidates, and these young women are called Potentials. Then, if the slayer is killed, the mantle is passed to one of these Potentials, who suddenly has all this high-juju power.
In the last year, during the last season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, all of these Potentials are getting trained, and in each different episode a different Potential is featured. It's sort of like a Buffy the Vampire Slayer / American Idol. All of these different candidates are being featured, and you don't know who the next slayer is going to be.
In the last episode, the episode that's just like Pentecost, a whole bunch of these Potentials are together in one room, and there are other Potentials scattered throughout the world as well. Buffy is getting ready to do this ritual which would allow the slayer mantle to be taken off her shoulders and be given to one of the other women, who would become the new vampire slayer. Now, what has made Buffy be such a good vampire slayer for the previous seven years, and what has made the show so endearing, is that Buffy and her sidekicks are always bending the rules. Doing things unconventionally was what helped them catch the evil vampires off guard. As they're doing this ritual that is going to pass the mantle on to the next slayer, one of Buffy's companions tweaks the ritual. The result is that the mantle is not passed from Buffy to one Potential, but instead the mantle is passed to every Potential. All of a sudden, every young woman in this room, and all of the Potentials around the globe, become vampire slayers.
Just imagine that you are the head evil vampire. For seven years you've been fighting this one vampire slayer, Buffy, and it's exhausting. All of a sudden, in the blink of an eye, you have thousands of slayers to contend with. That's Pentecost.
That's Pentecost. What happens on Pentecost is, all of a sudden, in the blink of an eye, there are all of these people filled with God's Spirit, becoming Jesus. There are a few differences between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Pentecost, however. The principal difference is that, for Buffy, combating evil consisted of using wooden stakes and lots of kicking. Jesus, on the other hand, didn't use wooden stakes, and I don't recall any story from the Gospels involving kicking. What he did to combat evil was to love and to spend himself in love.
Jesus changed the world by spending himself in love. Then, all of a sudden, in the feast of Pentecost, that one person becomes hundreds of people. Those hundreds of people have become thousands of people; those thousands of people have become millions of people, around the world, spending themselves in love. Just think of it... spending themselves in love.
When Jesus did this, he said to his disciples, "Just as the father sent me, so I send you." In today's Gospel reading he said, "You're going to do the same things that I've done. In fact, you're going to do greater things than me." Have you ever heard that? Really heard it? Jesus tells his disciples, his followers, that we are going to do greater things than he did. Jesus isn't interested in us worshiping him; he's interested in us being him. Greater works than these we will do.
I have a problem with that. I have a problem with it because I've tried walking on water, and it hasn't worked yet. I haven't gotten even One step where I haven't sunk, and I'm thinking, if Jesus walked on water, and he said you're going to do greater things, what's up with this? I can't walk on water!
I've been wrestling with this, with what this could mean. I came across a story by Tony Campolo, an American Baptist minister whom I have quoted in the past. Tony was also wrestling with this passage, and he's a good Baptist, so he knows the Bible. He reads this section where Jesus says you're going to do greater things than Jesus himself had done. So Tony's thinking, you know, I haven't been able to walk on water yet. In the context of him wrestling with this passage, he went to Haiti. As a part of his ministry, he was working with a bunch of schools and orphanages in Haiti.
He tells the story that, one day, at the end of the day, he's walking back to his hotel and he's approached by three young women, three girls, the oldest of whom couldn't have been fifteen. One of them, the middle one, says "Hey, mister, for 10 bucks I'll go with you to your room." Tony stopped short. He looked at the next girl. "What about you? 10 bucks?" She said yes. He asked the last girl. "You? 10 bucks?" Yes. He could see that these three girls were working hard to close the deal. They needed the money, but they couldn't hide the disgust and sadness on their faces.
Tony said, "You've got a deal. 30 bucks. I'm in room 210. Be there in fifteen minutes." He went up to his room. He called the concierge. He asked for every Walt Disney movie they had in stock to be brought up. He called room service. He asked for four ice cream Sundays, extra ice cream, extra whipped cream. When the girls arrived, he had them sit on the edge of his bed. They watched Walt Disney movies, they ate ice cream Sundays, they laughed. By one in the morning, the girls had fallen asleep. Tony sat there, looked at these girls, and said to himself, nothing's changed.
Nothing's changed. Tomorrow they're going to be back on the street. Tomorrow they're going to be begging again. Nothing's changed.
Then a voice spoke in his head. It said to him, "But tonight, these girls were given the chance to be kids again. Tonight, these girls got to laugh. Tonight, these kids were loved." Tony thought about that, and asked himself, can I compare what happened tonight with walking on water?
If you were to ask Jesus which was the greater work, walking on water or letting these three girls be children again for one night, which would Jesus choose? Greater works than these you will do... Greater works than these we will do. Imagine how our lives would be transformed, our world would be transformed, if we got that. If we understood that God's Spirit is alive in us; full in us; empowering us to spend ourselves in love for the world.
Imagine the world covered with millions of Jesuses. That's Pentecost. On Christmas, we celebrated the birth of one person who was filled with God's Spirit. Pentecost is like that, but different. It's much bigger. It's the birth of each of us filled with God's Spirit, sent into the world to spend ourselves, in love, for the world.
So. It's not Merry Christmas. It's Happy Birthday. Amen.