"New Wine."

Acts 2:1-21

June 9, 2019

I.

On that special Day of Pentecost, when the apostles are gathered in the same upstairs room where Jesus had celebrated the Passover with them 50 days earlier, after the Holy Spirit falls on them in the form of “tongues of fire” ululating over their heads, enabling them to speak and be heard by people from all over the known world in their own languages, some of the observers scoff at them.  They think the disciples are drunk.  “They are filled with new wine,” they quip.

This is not something that Presbyterians are often accused of.  Only rarely does anyone look at us and dismisses us for acting like a bunch of inebriated carousers.  We tend to be pretty staid, controlled, sober, and dignified (with a few individual exceptions I will not identify).  Not that there’s anything wrong with that….  I mean, we range from decent-and-in-order on a good day, to frozen-chosen on our worst days.  No one ever refers to “Those wild and crazy Presbyterians.”  With the possible exception of seminary parties.

When he hears this critique, that they are all drunk, Peter says, “Yo, we can’t be drunk, it’s only 9 o’clock in the morning!”  (Peter had obviously never been to a some parades I've been to, where you’re wading through empty beer bottles by 8:30.  But I digress.)

The thing that the disciples are doing that makes them seem drunk is… communicating.  They are talking, and the miracle is that all language barriers are broken down, and people actually understand them.  Sometimes I wish this miracle would happen when we all speak English!  I recently had someone complain about a sermon being too political because I talked too much about immigrants.  In the actual sermon I didn’t even allude to immigrants.  But clearly that was what was on this person’s brain so much that everything they heard was somehow about immigrants.  

Communication is always a miracle when it happens, and it doesn’t happen that often, believe me.  It’s like we each have our own private language, and the words we say and hear are mainly about ourselves — our fears, our anger, our desires, our hopes, our memories.  And what we say only makes sense to someone else when they can make it relate to their fears, anger, desires, hope, and memories.  It’s like we’ve got these internal monologues going and sometimes some of it leaks out in actual speech, which someone else might hear and connect to their own internal monologue.

But what gets communicated?  What information gets transferred intact from one person to another?  Very little, I fear.

And yet here we get the impression that there is this mystical miracle in which what the apostles say gets immediately comprehended by the hearers, cutting through language barriers and internal monologues, conveying directly this new information about God’s work in Jesus Christ.  And it is nevertheless so disconcerting to some that they defensively dismiss it as drunken craziness.

It like a bunch of people proclaiming: “God loves you all!” and some responding with, “Woah, that’s crazy; have another cup of wine.…”

II.      

Then Peter, in an attempt to explain what is going on, delivers a long quote from the prophet Joel about how “in the last days” God will pour out the Holy Spirit, God’s own Breath, the creative force the universe, upon “all flesh,” which is to say, everyone.  People will have visions and dreams; they will deliver ecstatic prophecies.  They will, in other words, communicate.  They will be empowered to tell the truth, and speak words that will somehow cut through our ego-centric filters and actually inspire and inform people.  They will point-out what’s what.

This will be accompanied by spectacular signs in the sky and on the earth, which sound more like the Book of Revelation. 

The thing I want to draw your attention to here, is that Peter is under the impression that “the last days” are now.  He is saying that “the last days” have arrived, as evidenced by this outpouring of the Spirit on the disciples of Jesus.  They are just the vanguard of a more general distribution of the Spirit.  This is only the beginning.  But like the apostle Paul says, “Look, now is the opportune time; today is the day of salvation!”  

Peter is saying that God’s future has broken into the present.  Linear time is an illusion; the future isn’t far off so much as always available and present to us, if we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.  The way to experience and know God’s future is not by prognostication or analysis of the past and projecting trends forward.  It is by waiting… it is by getting in touch with the present where God is always alive… it is by going inward and finding that the future, the last days, is in a deep sense already here, with, within, and among us.

This is what Jesus himself proclaims at the outset of his ministry: the Kingdom of God has come near.  It is not something that only happens when we die or when Jesus returns at some far off conclusion of time.  It is near, it is available, it is touchable, it is present, here and now.  We do not have to wait for God to be present to us, that is a given.  Our waiting is for us to let go of enough of the baggage we are holding on to so that we may be present to God.

This is what the Holy Spirit has been teaching the disciples over the last 50 days as they at first cowered in that room in Jerusalem, where the risen Lord Jesus appears to them.  The resurrection of Jesus reveals our true human nature and destiny, it reveals the truth beneath the turbulence of our corrupted experience, it shows that the true and eternal life which we always imagined to be far away and inaccessible, is right here. 

If we were to suggest that, no, the last days have not yet arrived, Peter would give us an argument.  He would just point to this glorious and joyful noise emanating from his friends, all testifying to God’s amazing, redeeming love, and say, “Don’t believe me, then; but believe the words of the prophet Joel who predicted exactly this!”

III.

In conclusion, Peter remembers Joel’s words: “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”  Joel’s book, you may recall, is about a devastating plague of locusts brought on by the people’s injustices.  In the end God does restore the appropriately purged people.  It is after that that Joel says the words Peter recites.

And the urge that people “call on the name of the Lord” in order to be saved seems to mean that it is this act, calling on God’s name, which is to say, calling on Jesus Christ, the One True God, who reveals the divine nature and presence to us, in itself is instrumental in cutting through the ravages of time and history, and grounding us in eternity.  Calling on his name makes present God’s future, it brings God into our lives today.

Some of you know that one of the pillars of my own spiritual practice is something called “The Jesus Prayer,” or “The Prayer of the Heart,” which involves a simple repetition of Jesus’ name or a short prayer about his name.  “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner,” is the standard form.  The point of this calling on the name of the Lord is to ground us inwardly in the eternity his name represents, thus bringing us to a deep trust in him.  It is to make present the future of his coming, realizing that he is always here and it is we who need to show up.

To call on the name of the Lord is to realize that God is reconciling the world in Jesus Christ.  The name is about God’s love and compassion and forgiveness, and letting that enter us to be expressed and shared by us.  That’s why Jesus has us pray to keep the name holy and not misuse or abuse it, because if we lose the true meaning of his name and let it be cluttered with other associations, some of which are truly contradictory to God’s purpose, it ceases to serve as this doorway to eternity, and becomes just another dead-end in our morass of useless verbiage.  It stops communicating.

The power of the name is also that it is expressive of Oneness and unity.  Jesus is God’s Word by whom God breathes creation into being… all creation.  He is the truly human one and at the same time “true God of true God.”   His name therefore brings together everything and reveals that we are all siblings together.  Just as there is that list of nationalities and languages encompassing a representative selection of the whole known world, God in Christ speaks to all because God is in all.  Even animals, birds, fish, trees, and rocks are, in the insight of the people who once inhabited this land, “all our relations.”  This is what his name reveals.  This is what we are invoking when we call on the name of the Lord.

IV.

So let’s go out into this world filled with the Spirit.  Let us call on the name of the Lord with confidence, and bring by our acts of compassion, sharing, forgiveness, acceptance, non-violence, generosity, and love, God’s name into the lives of people with such vigor and confidence that they do not recognize us as Presbyterians, but wonder what we’re on… and want some of it.  It’s new wine indeed, the wine of God’s promised future, and it’s available now.

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