Ezekiel 37:1-14
Acts 2:1-21
I grew up in a beach town. Among my childhood memories are countless days at the beach. My mom, Arlene, and either or both of the Shirleys would pack some combination of a dozen kids into some combination of vehicles and sometimes just one vehicle packed like a clown car, and head off to the public beaches, where we would eat sandy sandwiches, get stung by jellyfish, and otherwise have a grand old time, even when “Jaws” hit the theaters and made everyone else afraid of the water. In fact, maybe especially then, since the beach was less crowded.
We never lived close enough for me to bike to the beach like a real surf rat, but beach culture was always there. When “Margaritaville” came out in 1977, it went right into high rotation on local radio stations, and I have been a bit of a Jimmy Buffett fan ever since, despite not liking Margaritas. In fact I was never really a full-fledged “Parrothead,” as his most diehard fans were known, for like the Grateful Dead, Phish, and the Dave Matthews Band, loving Jimmy Buffett is almost a religion, traveling from show to show all summer. One thing is for sure, though. I know a lot of his songs, from Come Monday to Cheeseburger In Paradise. Buffett died from cancer last September.
During his long career, Jimmy Buffett collaborated with some of my other favorite artists, including other beach-culture musicians like Jack Johnson and Kenny Chesney. But it was a traditional country music artist that collaborated on the song that provides the title for this morning’s sermon, “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere,” a reminder that the day job may drive you to day drinking.
I always think of this song when we get to Pentecost because I find Peter’s words in our scripture reading both incredibly human and incredibly amusing, the sort of text that makes me believe in the historic core at the heart of the text.
“They’re not drunk,” Peter proclaims. “It’s only the third hour of the day!,” which is what he actually would have said because 9:00am is not how they told time back then. And all I can think is, you know, “It’s the eleventh hour somewhere!,” though the eleventh hour, too, has taken on a completely different cultural meaning. In any case, the time of day has never stopped a committed drunk.
The disciples, having returned to Jerusalem after hanging out with Jesus in Galilee, must have sounded drunk. I mean, sure there was the language thing. Luke makes a big deal out of the language thing, emphasizing how cosmopolitan Jerusalem was, cataloging as many as fifteen regions represented. But honestly, that isn’t the miracle that impresses me.
It isn’t the resurrection that impresses me. Love won, the grave was emptied, and embodied/not embodied Jesus ate fish, walked through closed doors, and helped his followers understand what had just happened, but then he disappeared again, “touchdown Jesus” ascending.
They had the Holy Spirit, come down like tongues of flame, but the Holy Spirit was not like some demon possessing a body. They were the bodies, those bumpkin followers. They were the bodies who had the audacity to continue to proclaim an alternative to the brutality of Rome and the greed and corruption of the Sanhedrin, even after their leader had been tortured and killed. Fifty days later, and you know what had changed in the world of Roman-occupied Judea? Zilch, nada, nothing. Nothing, that is, except them.
Call it the Holy Spirit. Sure. But it was more than a little crazy to keep telling people that better was possible, better government, better business, better community, even better selves, because God was better than they had ever imagined. They knew this for a fact, for they had experienced it in a better man who made the broken feel whole.
It was a little crazy to say that good was on the move, and that they, women and men from the sticks, completely un-credentialed in the ways of that ancient time, were the vectors that were taking it viral, to anyone who could hear the good news, regardless of their language or culture. There was room for Nicodemus, an Ethiopian eunuch, a wealthy woman in Corinth.
We can get caught up in Trinitarian weirdness, trying to figure out how God is three and one at the same time, a formula they had to invent when they were trying to understand the Spirit. We can discount the gifts of the Spirit, believers convulsing on the floor and babbling in religious ecstasy. You can be assured that I have no intention of becoming one more dead rattlesnake-handing pastor.
But we should not discount the holy mystery that is absolutely there when we help someone see God’s love when all they have seen so far in their life was a book and hate and judgment, when they don’t even love themselves.
Christmas is a wonderful re-telling of the Nativity myth and a chance to remember the improbability of the holy entering our world in specificity, God-with-us as an agent of love.
Easter should be a little bit shocking every time we tell the story of the absolute victory of evil then overturned by a love so powerful no tomb could contain it.
But is is Pentecost that is the birth of the church, for the Holy Spirit didn’t go from God to Peter to some other imaginary pontiff, always mediated through one agent in one place, but instead came to all of those who believed. Our faith is absolutely democratic, just as God intended, just as we read in the Acts of the Apostles and the early church. Philip does not need Peter’s permission to answer the call of the Spirit. Paul may get the blessing of the Council of Jerusalem, but that was a council. Peter wasn’t even the head of the church in Jerusalem, and besides, the horse, in this case the mission to the Gentiles, was well and truly out of the barn by then.
We are a heady bunch in the United Church of Christ. We want data. I’m with you. I get it. But sometimes we just have to allow ourselves to be swept up in the might be, to decide what we want to believe.
Because it sure looks like evil is winning these days. Greg Abbott has just told Texans it is okay to shoot progressive protesters. Glenn Youngkin has just told Virginians that it is okay to celebrate the brutality and evil of slavery, and while he was at it, that the state would not insure a woman’s right to contraception. Harrison Butker has just told women that their only proper role is to be a homemaking servant to their husband, though that man’s credentials are that he can kick a football and his own mother has had a distinguished career, so let the idiots waste money on his jersey. Billionaire Bill Ackman wants you to believe that if you dare proclaim the humanity of Palestinians, that you will lose your job and have your career destroyed, a blacklisting every bit as vile as that of McCarthy. It looks bad, I’ll admit.
But when this church was founded, humans were still held in bondage, beaten and brutalized right here in the United States. When Congregationalists ordained a woman in the United States in 1853, women couldn’t vote. Sixty years ago, schools were racially segregated in America’s apartheid, and though Protestants would create so-called “Christian” schools across the nation to preserve white-supremacy, our public schools are meant to be color-blind, as we celebrated Brown vs. Board of Education this week.
Twenty years and three days ago, I could not have gotten married anywhere in this country. Despite the genocides in Gaza and Sudan, fewer people live in poverty and fewer starve worldwide, even if poverty and hunger are on the rise in kleptocracies like the United States.
Call it Holy Spirit, or a little crazy, or weird wiring, this perverse refusal to surrender to pessimism, this hard-headed sticking in there that demands we get up again and again, move forward inch by hard-won inch. But that is our way, the way of a mad man in Babylon who believed the dried out bones of Israel could come back to life, the way of disciples who had seen their teacher executed and who were asked to believe that the Spirit of God was still with them, a fire in their hearts, the way of a church that is willing to take on the climate-changing destruction of corporations and the woman-destroying politics of patriarchy, willing to say that every child should have safe housing in a city in the Southern Tier and on the other side of the world, where Israel commits war crimes and we are complicit.
It takes a little bit of Spirit to get out of bed and do it all over again, but we do, though hopefully with coffee or tea and not a morning margarita, for it may be five o’clock somewhere, but we are going to need our wits about us. May you start the day with crazy faith and true grit, this day and always. Amen.