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by Jim McCrea Acts 2:1-21 When I was very young, I was fascinated with fireflies, although back in Pennsylvania where I lived at the time, we called them "lightning bugs." Whatever you call them, they seemed magical to me. How else could you describe a tiny dance of lights flickering on and off every summer night in our otherwise mundane back yard? In my own mind, I wasn't quite sure that those lightning bugs weren't really fairies dancing in the air as they carried tiny lanterns to light their steps. But I found out otherwise one night when my older and thus clearly wiser brother suggested one night that we catch a bunch of fireflies and use them as a nightlight. So we got a clean Mason jar and lid from our Mom, and we put a little bit of grass and a couple of small rocks in the bottom to make the fireflies feel at home. Then we set out to catch as many of them as we could. Surprisingly, to me anyway, they didn't turn out to be fairies at all, but little bugs that had to be handled very gently to avoid squishing them. And, even though they seemed to be largely oblivious to our efforts to chorale them, they still proved to be incredibly hard to catch because the night was so dark that you could only see them when they gave themselves away with their brief bursts of light. Typically those lights would go out as we approached them, so we had to learn how to anticipate where the lightning bugs were going, carefully estimating velocities and plotting trajectories - not that either of us had ever heard those terms before. Anyway, when we decided that we had captured a sufficient number of fireflies - or when we had reached the outer limits of our attention spans - we closed the lid on the Mason jar tightly, having already poked holes in it to give our guests some air. Then we went inside with our prizes. But once we were in our room, the magic was gone. In the clear light of the house, they turned out to be ordinary-looking bugs. Oh, they would light up now and then, but their light certainly wasn't bright enough to serve as a nightlight that could hold the monsters at bay. And worse yet, by morning, most of the fireflies were dead. I think a little bit of our innocence died that night as well. So we sadly took the jar outside after breakfast and dumped its contents out on the grass, hoping that those bugs that still survived would recover from their ordeal and would ultimately forgive us. I remember another childhood experiment that turned out to have an equally disappointing end, although this one was one that I conducted completely on my own. I remember it being a beautiful spring day with the faint scent of lilacs wafting through the air, although for all I know, it really could have been an Indian summer day spent too close to the dryer vent. But we'll go with the way I remember it, whether that's right in every detail or not. I was enchanted by the sheer smell of freshness in the air - a gentle breeze was carrying the aroma of lilacs and maybe a trace of roses from my mother's beloved rose garden. I thought that it was a hint of what heaven would to be like, and I wanted to preserve the moment. So I went into the house and once again got out a clean Mason jar and lid. Useful things, those jars! Then I came back outside and ran into the wind to scoop up as much of that beguiling scent as I could. Finally, I clamped the lid down as quickly as possible to keep the scent from escaping. Then I went inside to enjoy my treasure. Only, as I'm all of you have already guessed, it didn't work. The wonderful smell of that spring morning refused to be bottled inside a Mason jar. Instead, that fragrance proved to be a grace that could only be enjoyed by those who happened to be outdoors in the moment when the breeze teased their scent out of the lilacs. And, in essence, that's what the original Pentecost was all about. Following Jesus' request, the extended group of Jesus' disciples - which numbered about 120 men and women - were gathered together in the Upper Room, praying and waiting for the fulfillment of Jesus' promise that they would be baptized with the Holy Spirit. And then suddenly, on the day of Pentecost, which was the traditional end of the Jewish Harvest Festival, they heard the sound of a violent wind tearing into the room and saw a blistering fire hovering just below the ceiling. Individual flames reached down to the disciples, engulfing the head of each person in the room and, yet no one was burned. Instead, they were filled with God's Spirit. The imagery of this momentous event comes from the 19th chapter of Exodus when the newly-freed Israelite slaves gather at the foot of Mount Sinai to make a solemn covenant with the God who had freed them. And what they experienced that day is described by the book Exodus in these words: "On the morning of the third day there was thunder and lightning, as well as a thick cloud on the mountain, and a blast of a trumpet so loud that all the people who were in the camp trembled. Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God. They took their stand at the foot of the mountain. Now Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke, because the LORD had descended upon it in fire; the smoke went up like the smoke of a kiln, while the whole mountain shook violently." (Exodus 19:16-18) The whole experience was so frightening to the Israelites that they made Moses ask God to never speak directly to them again. Instead, they wanted Moses to talk with God and then tell them what God had said. They were afraid that if they were to come into direct contact with God's pure holiness, their own sinful nature would cause them to be consumed. Centuries later, at the first Christian Pentecost, the wind and fire experienced by the disciples demonstrate the real presence of God, who entered into the assembled disciples and empowered them to speak on God's behalf to all the peoples of the world. And so they immediately burst out of the Upper Room and began to do just that. But, much like my jar of spring breeze, those disciples clearly didn't control the Holy Spirit. It came to them on its own time table and with its own agenda. Yet, it only came when it was invited by the disciples, who had gathered together for 10 days in prayer and worship prior to this event. In addition, the Spirit proved to be far too powerful and far too big to be contained by just that small group of disciples. So that on the very day that it had arrived in their midst, the church exploded from 120 members to 3,120 members. And you think we have parking problems! But what wonderful problems to have. Just as I couldn't bottle the aroma of as springtime day to save for later enjoyment, neither could the coming of the Holy Spirit be bottled up and contained within the pages of our Bibles nor shut away in some dusty history. For the gift of the Holy Spirit is not a one-time thing. It is a gift that God gives every Christian at the time of their baptism, and that gift never leaves any of us throughout our lifetimes. The reality is that, like those scent molecules lurking invisibly in that Mason jar, we may not always be able to detect the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives, but that doesn't really mean that the Holy Spirit is not here with us. Whenever the Bible describes the Holy Spirit, it does so in terms of metaphor or in terms of what the Spirit does. So we see the Spirit blowing across the waters of chaos before it bursts into the creative activity that brought the universe into being. It was the Holy Spirit who was breathed into Adam and Eve's nostrils to bring them to life. It was the Holy Spirit who caused the plagues in Egypt and who held back the Rea Sea waters so the Israelites could walk across on dry land. It was the Holy Spirit who caused the sons and daughters of Israel to prophesy, and who led the young ones to see visions and the old ones to dream dreams. It was the Holy Spirit who moved across the Valley of Dry Bones in Ezekiel and brought new life where there was no hope for life at all. It was the Holy Spirit, who, in some mystical way, came upon a young girl named Mary and gave her a son, who would be the living embodiment of all that is human and all that is divine and who would teach us that God's love for us literally has no bounds. And yet, nowhere in the Bible is there is direct description of who the Holy Spirit is or how you can recognize it in your own life. The result is that most of us who aren't members of one of the evangelical traditions, have a hard time understanding the Holy Spirit. It all seems so amorphous, so hard to get hold of. And for most of us, it seems really foreign to our lives. But the Holy Spirit has ways to get the attention of even people like us. When we can't feel God's presence with us, the Spirit gives us a sense of what we are missing by giving us a feeling of dissatisfaction or a feeling of incompleteness in our lives. That can be seen as the divine equivalent of an insistent tap on the shoulder. As Lloyd Ogilvie says, "A sense of need is a gift. The recognition of spiritual emptiness is a blessing. A realization of the distance between what we are and what we could become is a special grace. The Lord is never nearer than when he excavates a sense of emptiness in us. The Holy Spirit can fill only empty hearts. The Apostles more than met this qualification as they waited in the Upper Room during the ten-day interval between Jesus' Ascension and Pentecost. Emptiness? They felt it with devastating insufficiency." And yet, when the Holy Spirit came upon them, they were radically and permanently changed. The same thing that happened to them 2,000 years ago, happens to all believers in all times. As Paul wrote to the Ephesians: "...Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God's possession - to the praise of his glory." (Ephesians 1:13-14) So where is your sense of need? The Holy Spirit is within you, revealing God's truth to you from the inside out, bringing new life and transformation to the broken areas of your existence, offering you forgiveness and freedom from your sins, and challenging you to enlarge your sphere of concern so that the gifts God has showered upon you may be used to meet the needs of all of God's people. That is true of our community at First Presbyterian Church as well. As we face what may be the death struggles of the Fall Tour of Homes, we ask you to pray about what we should do. Everything has a life cycle and perhaps this is the Tour's time to die. Perhaps it isn't. But in any case, if we all faithfully devote ourselves to prayer over the issue, I am convinced that God will soon reveal to us whether we should continue the Tour or not and, if not what we should do to raise funds for our charities. I believe that our prayer over this issue is vital at this time. But the same thing is true about your own relationship with God. Pray that God will open your eyes to the gifts you have been given, to the graces you have enjoyed and to the ways you can share those things with those around y who are starving for a sense of God's presence. You have been given the Holy Spirit and it is the spirit of truth and creativity. The Holy Spirit can not be harnessed or domesticated, but its power is always available to bring us back on track, to draw us out of our self-involvement and to extend grace and hope to the world. Come, Holy Spirit, Come! Amen.
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