Unleashing the Spirit
Text: Ezekiel 37:1-14
Happy Pentecost!!! You’ve heard me mention this before, but of all of the high-holy-days of the church, this one has to be the most important forgotten holiday that we celebrate. Sure, we are all familiar with Christmas and Easter, but today is Pentecost… the very day when we celebrate God’s gift of the Holy Spirit. In the Christian church, Pentecost is older than Christmas! It was celebrated alongside Easter right from the word go… but it wouldn’t be until some three hundred years later when Christmas would become part of the scene. So quickly we forget.
But then again, Pentecost is not something one can easily nail down either. We can’t attach it to winter solstice or spring celebrations in other cultures. It stands alone mid-way through Spring… and because it floats around like Easter does, it sometimes falls on Mother’s Day or the May two-four weekend. No wonder we end up missing it.
Over time, Pentecost has become the best-kept secret of our faith… so secret in fact, that we have all but forgotten about it. As such our faith has become withered and pale, without passion or enthusiasm. Like withered bones, the remnants of the mainline church lie scattered across a valley… without much signs of life.
Hardly an inspiring image is it? But then again, it’s entirely Biblical.
When it comes to Pentecost Sunday, when we do pay attention to it, we are most familiar with the story from the Second Chapter of Acts, where the disciples are gathered together, some ten days after the Ascension of Jesus. In a stunning display, these simple people from Galilee have an experience that transforms them from the clueless followers of a poor backwater preacher, into a group of people who will change the world. That’s the kind of powerful story we want to hear…
…but there is this other story… Ezekiel… Maybe you’ve heard of him. Yes… the one who saw the wheel a-rollin’ up in the middle of the air. That one. A prophet, who like Jeremiah, personally witnessed the invasion and destruction of his homeland some six hundred years before the birth of Christ. An ordinary person who had every reason to believe that Israel’s faith was dead and buried, with its bones scattered to the four winds.
I have to be honest, I think this is a Biblical story, a Pentecost story, that we can connect to better than the tongues of fire in Acts… because perhaps we see it a bit more in that the church isn’t quite the same as many of us remember. The glory days have passed us by. We see and feel more like dry bones than disciples filled with the Holy Spirit.
Yet, as Ezekiel tells the story, when God calls him to speak to the dry bones, suddenly the Holy Spirit is unleashed, restoring the bones to flesh, and ultimately breathing the Spirit of life into them.
“Dem Bones Dem Bones, dem dry bones, come hear the word of the Lord!!”
–Now you know where that song came from.
Where once there was a field of nothing but devastation and lifelessness, there is this image of the Spirit unleashed, and new life explodes in ways beyond what one thought possible.
Of all the stories of Pentecost Sunday, I think this story from Ezekiel is the one that we can connect to the most. For us, more recently, we have only just started to experience what can happen when we let a whisper of the Holy Spirit into our lives. Over the past year, we have been re-learning what Spirituality is for us as a congregation, and are learning that Passionate is not a bad word! In this process, we have heard our dry bones rattle…
Pentecost is all about unleashing the Spirit… of unlimited possibilities and potential. It’s not about emotional highs or perpetual feelings of euphoria. I think somehow we have confused passionate with being unhinged wing-nuts.
But that’s not what being passionate about our faith is.
Maybe we need to re-frame this a little bit: How many of you have hobbies?
I’ll share with you something from my household… I build & paint miniatures. Little models… I even occasionally play games with them. My wife is an avid cross-stitcher and scrapbook enthusiast. These are activities that give us a break from our otherwise busy lives, a bit of down-time. Whether we acknowledge it or not, almost all of us have hobbies… things that we are genuinely interested in that we enjoy doing… I’d even say that these are things that we’re probably quite passionate about. Chances are, given the opportunity, we’d be quite happy to talk at length (Geek-out) with anybody who will listen. Not only that, when we find someone else who shares a similar interest, we could be there for hours!
Now, imagine that same sense of interest that drives your hobbies, and bring that into your experience of faith. That’s the kind of passion we’re talking about. It can be extremely expressive, like the fans of Toronto FC who make BMO field the loudest stadium in the GTA, or very intense, as someone knowing the intricacies of stamp collecting. Is one more passionate than the other? Hardly! The same can be said as to how passionate we are about our faith!
Yet perhaps because we have had this fear of appearing too emotional in our expression of our faith, we’ve placed limits on where God can be, and where God can choose to act. We’ve put a lock on the Holy Spirit. As we’ve been learning. It’s time to take that lock off, unleash the Spirit, and to really see what God can do.
Amen.
Happy Pentecost!!! You’ve heard me mention this before, but of all of the high-holy-days of the church, this one has to be the most important forgotten holiday that we celebrate. Sure, we are all familiar with Christmas and Easter, but today is Pentecost… the very day when we celebrate God’s gift of the Holy Spirit. In the Christian church, Pentecost is older than Christmas! It was celebrated alongside Easter right from the word go… but it wouldn’t be until some three hundred years later when Christmas would become part of the scene. So quickly we forget.
But then again, Pentecost is not something one can easily nail down either. We can’t attach it to winter solstice or spring celebrations in other cultures. It stands alone mid-way through Spring… and because it floats around like Easter does, it sometimes falls on Mother’s Day or the May two-four weekend. No wonder we end up missing it.
Over time, Pentecost has become the best-kept secret of our faith… so secret in fact, that we have all but forgotten about it. As such our faith has become withered and pale, without passion or enthusiasm. Like withered bones, the remnants of the mainline church lie scattered across a valley… without much signs of life.
Hardly an inspiring image is it? But then again, it’s entirely Biblical.
When it comes to Pentecost Sunday, when we do pay attention to it, we are most familiar with the story from the Second Chapter of Acts, where the disciples are gathered together, some ten days after the Ascension of Jesus. In a stunning display, these simple people from Galilee have an experience that transforms them from the clueless followers of a poor backwater preacher, into a group of people who will change the world. That’s the kind of powerful story we want to hear…
…but there is this other story… Ezekiel… Maybe you’ve heard of him. Yes… the one who saw the wheel a-rollin’ up in the middle of the air. That one. A prophet, who like Jeremiah, personally witnessed the invasion and destruction of his homeland some six hundred years before the birth of Christ. An ordinary person who had every reason to believe that Israel’s faith was dead and buried, with its bones scattered to the four winds.
I have to be honest, I think this is a Biblical story, a Pentecost story, that we can connect to better than the tongues of fire in Acts… because perhaps we see it a bit more in that the church isn’t quite the same as many of us remember. The glory days have passed us by. We see and feel more like dry bones than disciples filled with the Holy Spirit.
Yet, as Ezekiel tells the story, when God calls him to speak to the dry bones, suddenly the Holy Spirit is unleashed, restoring the bones to flesh, and ultimately breathing the Spirit of life into them.
“Dem Bones Dem Bones, dem dry bones, come hear the word of the Lord!!”
–Now you know where that song came from.
Where once there was a field of nothing but devastation and lifelessness, there is this image of the Spirit unleashed, and new life explodes in ways beyond what one thought possible.
Of all the stories of Pentecost Sunday, I think this story from Ezekiel is the one that we can connect to the most. For us, more recently, we have only just started to experience what can happen when we let a whisper of the Holy Spirit into our lives. Over the past year, we have been re-learning what Spirituality is for us as a congregation, and are learning that Passionate is not a bad word! In this process, we have heard our dry bones rattle…
Pentecost is all about unleashing the Spirit… of unlimited possibilities and potential. It’s not about emotional highs or perpetual feelings of euphoria. I think somehow we have confused passionate with being unhinged wing-nuts.
But that’s not what being passionate about our faith is.
Maybe we need to re-frame this a little bit: How many of you have hobbies?
I’ll share with you something from my household… I build & paint miniatures. Little models… I even occasionally play games with them. My wife is an avid cross-stitcher and scrapbook enthusiast. These are activities that give us a break from our otherwise busy lives, a bit of down-time. Whether we acknowledge it or not, almost all of us have hobbies… things that we are genuinely interested in that we enjoy doing… I’d even say that these are things that we’re probably quite passionate about. Chances are, given the opportunity, we’d be quite happy to talk at length (Geek-out) with anybody who will listen. Not only that, when we find someone else who shares a similar interest, we could be there for hours!
Now, imagine that same sense of interest that drives your hobbies, and bring that into your experience of faith. That’s the kind of passion we’re talking about. It can be extremely expressive, like the fans of Toronto FC who make BMO field the loudest stadium in the GTA, or very intense, as someone knowing the intricacies of stamp collecting. Is one more passionate than the other? Hardly! The same can be said as to how passionate we are about our faith!
Yet perhaps because we have had this fear of appearing too emotional in our expression of our faith, we’ve placed limits on where God can be, and where God can choose to act. We’ve put a lock on the Holy Spirit. As we’ve been learning. It’s time to take that lock off, unleash the Spirit, and to really see what God can do.
Amen.
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