Sermon for Sunday, May 28, 2023 || Pentecost A || Number 11:24-30; Acts 2:1-21

At the end of last Sunday’s sermon, I asked this question: “Where do you see God’s presence today?” We talked about recognizing the presence of God in big things like sunsets and star-strewn skies and little things like the veins of a leaf and our breath. Today, I’d like to follow up last week’s sermon with a very simple concept that I’m then going to talk about for ten minutes. The simple concept is this: God’s presence is everywhere, so we must be careful not to limit the places where we look for that presence.

We’ll start with a passage of scripture that has guided me for over fifteen years and is timely for today because today we celebrate the Feast of Pentecost, the day we remember the Holy Spirit descending like a rushing wind on the gathered disciples. The passage comes from Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus, a member of the religious establishment in Jerusalem. Over the course of their chat, Jesus moves Nicodemus further and further from his conventional mindset until Nicodemus is willing to accept new ideas. At one point Jesus says, “The wind blows where it chooses and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.”

In other words, Jesus says, don’t confine yourself to one particular stance or viewpoint. Follow the wind wherever it blows you even if, especially if, the wind blows you towards new experiences that stretch and grow you. In the original language of the Gospel, the words “wind” and “spirit” are the same, so we could say, “The Spirit blows where it chooses.” On that fateful day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit chose to blow through the house where Jesus’ disciples were gathered. The Spirit inspired the disciples to speak the good news in all the languages of the people traveling to Jerusalem for the festival.

Now, the disciples could have learned the wrong lesson from their encounter with the Spirit. They could have said to themselves, “There must be something special about the house we were in when that amazing thing happened. We should set up our base in that house. That house is where the Spirit came to us. That house will be central to our experience of God.”

Do you see where I’m going with this?

Thankfully, the original disciples did not draw this conclusion. They spread the good news of God in Christ far and wide. They met people on the road, they met people in prison, they met people by the river doing the washing. The Holy Spirit drew them into these encounters, and they found the presence of God simply everywhere they went.

This experience reflects the foundational story of the people of Israel: Abram and Sarai, who become Abraham and Sarah, leave their home in the city of Ur and strike out into the desert. Everywhere they go they find the presence of God already there, which was very different from their upbringing, where petty gods were bound to particular places. They went out into the wilderness and found God there. Generations later, their descendents fled Egypt and returned to the wilderness. They needed a little more help to remember God was still present, so they created the Ark of the Covenant (that’s the thing Indiana Jones rescued from the Nazis in 1936). Everywhere they went they set up a special tent in which to house the ark, which held the tablets of the commandments God gave to Moses. No matter where they went, the ark went with them, reminding them that God was still there, still with them wherever they were.

Fast forward many more generations and the people of Israel have defeated many other nations to take charge of the land they believed to be theirs by right. They now had a king and an army and cities with walls to keep out invaders. King David’s son Solomon did not think it was right that the Ark of the Covenant remained in such a temporary dwelling as a tent, not when he was living in a palace. So Solomon built the first temple. Now the people of Israel had a place to direct their worship of God.

While this wasn’t a bad thing, it did lead to one predictable outcome: with worship focused on one particular place, the expectation of finding God in other places was diminished. Fast forward a few more generations, the temple is destroyed, and the people taken into exile. And guess what? They found God in exile too! Several decades later they returned home and rebuilt the temple. The cycle renewed, and the imagination to see God’s presence everywhere faded again.

Take another big leap to the time of Jesus. When the Samaritan woman at the well asks Jesus where is the right place to worship (a hot button issue of the day), Jesus says, “The time is coming when you and your people will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem…But the time is coming—and is here!—when true worshippers will worship in spirit and truth. The Father looks for those who worship him this way. God is spirit, and it is necessary to worship God in spirit and truth.”

Jesus tries to break the woman out of the very common thinking that God must be worshiped in a particular place. No, Jesus says, worship in spirit and truth. In other words, go where the Spirit leads you and find the truth that God is present in both the leading and in the destination. With this point of view, Jesus echoes the story in our first reading today. Moses gathers the elders of Israel all around that tent I talked about a few minutes ago. The Spirit of God descends on them and they prophesy. But two of the elders – Eldad and Medad – didn’t make it to the tent. Do you remember what happened? The Spirit of God descended on them too, no matter where they were. This causes such a scandal that Moses has to step in and remind people that God’s Spirit goes wherever it chooses, just like the wind.

Okay, so what about us? Every one of us, myself included, has a tendency to confine God’s presence to this particular place, the building that houses our congregation. This is only natural because this place is where we actively praise and worship God together, the place with the symbols of the church and the special music and garments. At the same time, this place is like the gym where we exercise our theological imagination, our capacity to discover God’s presence. But the game doesn’t take place in the gym. It takes place out there on the field, in the world. God’s presence is boundless, limitless, right here and out there. And the wind of God’s Spirit blows us into all sorts of new encounters so that we can celebrate again and again our finding of God’s presence where we least expect it to show up.

On this Feast of Pentecost, we gather in this place to train our eyes to see the presence of God wherever we go. And more than that, we train our hearts to be the evidence of God’s presence to all whom we meet.