The Good People Who Go to Church

Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church

A warm welcome to each worshiper today. We celebrate you and offer you our friendship and love. We are a congregation of people who seek to grow spiritually, to become more like Christ in His compassion and acceptance of everyone while growing more aware of what it really means to be Christians today.

As a Reconciling Congregation, EPUMC affirms the sacred worth of persons of all sexual orientations and gender identities and welcomes them into full participation in the fellowship, membership, ministries, and leadership of the congregation.

943 Palmer Avenue, Schenectady, NY 12309 / 518-374-4306 epumc943@gmail.com / www.easternparkway.org

Order of Worship

May 19, 2024

Pentecost

10:00 a.m.

*You are invited to rise in body or spirit.

Prelude

Greeting and Announcements

Mission Statement: We are a faith community striving to be, to nurture, and to send forth disciples of Jesus Christ.

Call to Worship:

With tongues of flame, the Holy Spirit descends

to burn in our hearts anew.

Unite us, Holy Spirit!

Like the rush of wind, we sense God’s presence

blowing afresh throughout the world.

Unite us, Holy Spirit!

Across the barriers of language and culture,

Christ’s message of love and grace is heard.

Unite us, Holy Spirit!

Divine Advocate, we seek your guidance

as we search for the Spirit of Truth.

Unite us, Holy Spirit! Amen.

*Hymn We Gather Together #131

Prayer of Confession:

Heavenly Father,

you dwell within us

in sighs too deep for words,

yet we cannot hear you.

Caring Mother,

you wrap us tenderly in fierce love,

you give us the breath of life,

yet we cannot touch you.

Brother Jesus,

we yearn for your presence,

we seek your abundant grace,

yet we cannot feel it.

Sister Spirit,

you prepare to sear our souls for your purpose,

yet we allow our somber selves to intrude,

shutting our minds to your power.

Remind us, we pray,

that we need only trust in the giver of life

to find the hope and faith you have promised.

Gather us up in the winds of your favor

and carry us to ever greater heights,

through Christ who loves us still.

Assurance:

Do not be afraid.

Our Comforter and Advocate has come.

Rejoice in the knowledge that all is forgiven.

People of the Spirit, listen.

The wind that drives the heavens—

the wind that soars above and beyond us all,

unifies us in God’s love.

Keep the Spirit’s flame alight within your heart.

Await the new birth in Christ that is promised to all.

Scripture Reading Acts 2: 1-21

The Coming of the Holy Spirit

2 When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. 2 And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. 3 Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. 4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

5 Now there were devout Jews from every people under heaven living in Jerusalem. 6 And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. 7 Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? 8 And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? 9 Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10 Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, 11 Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” 12 All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” 13 But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”

Peter Addresses the Crowd

14 But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, “Fellow Jews[a] and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. 15 Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. 16 No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:

‘In the last days it will be, God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams.

Even upon my slaves, both men and women,
in those days I will pour out my Spirit,
and they shall prophesy.

And I will show portents in the heaven above
and signs on the earth below,
blood, and fire, and smoky mist.

The sun shall be turned to darkness
and the moon to blood,
before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day.

Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’

Sermon The Good People Who Go to Church

Friends, this week Stump the Preacher 2024 is intersecting with Pentecost. It’s a beloved, treasured church holiday to me for a few reasons. The first is that I get to show up in red shoes. The second, and more meaningful, is that the very first time I ever preached a sermon was on Pentecost, in 2004. And that experience ultimately brought me here. The third is that I love to unpack what Pentecost actually is. When I preached on it in 2004, at the age of 17, I had no ability to define Pentecost, which is kind of embarrassing for both me and my Sunday School teachers. I asked my mom what Pentecost was, this holiday I was invited to preach about, and she said “It’s the birthday of the church!” Why do we describe Pentecost that way? We’ll go there in a minute.

The Stump the Preacher element of this sermon, the last piece I’m putting before you, comes from my husband, Sean. He always throws a topic in the ring for Stump the Preacher, and they’re always great. This time he asked “Does going to church make you a good person?” Sean was raised by his grandparents. He didn’t go to church super often until he started dating me and I dragged him to church with me every week. As a kid, his Gram was able to convince him to come to the congregationalist church in town once a blue moon, and when Sean asked her what was worth getting out of bed before noon over the weekend for, she said “she wanted to live a good life, and she wanted to renew her faith.” Sean, then, being the smart alek he was, would ask her if her faith was like a magazine subscription. But it still raises the question for both of us, as adults, his Gram having gone on to life eternal many years ago, if she was right about any of that. When she got up to the Pearly Gates, did Jesus look at her church punch card, and congratulate her for going every week? Was there something about continually going back, even when her grandson was at home being a pain, that charged her with new faith? And did going make her a better person?

Let’s keep all that in mind while looking at this morning’s scripture.

This is the reading we land on every single year for Pentecost. Fun fact, if you haven’t heard this story from me before, the same Sunday in 2004 that I volunteered to preach, Sean was looking for what he thought would be an easy job, and he got stuck reading this passage, with the many many many proper place names. This passage is why no one wants to volunteer to read at church. And Sean, to this day, uses his willingness to read this passage at church 20 years ago as a reason to get out of washing the dishes. He served his time, y’all.

In the disciples’ time, Pentecost was a Jewish celebration of the Harvest, always taking place fifty days after Passover, hence the name. It was a holiday for which Jews made the pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem. So the disciples, still recovering from the death and resurrection of Jesus, not only took on another life changing event a mere seven weeks later, but went through it with an international audience. According to Luke, the evangelist who also wrote Acts, the Holy Spirit introduced herself to the disciples with a tornado, followed by a terrible case of heartburn that could only be cured by speaking a foreign language. Way to leave an amazing first impression, but that’s the Holy Spirit for you.

When someone like my mom calls Pentecost “the birthday of the church”, they’re certainly correct, but it says a whole lot about what the Church really is if it was born like this. Prior to this Pentecost, the Jesus movement was rather large, but scattered, and entirely made up of people who had seen and heard Jesus first hand. This is the first moment that the disciples did the work of telling the Good News themselves, without Jesus’ help, and it was the first time that, because Jesus was no longer there in person, his disciples would have to do such a good job of testifying to their experience of him that it would convince people to follow a man they’d never seen in the flesh.

In other words, the Church was born out of reaching people who are different from you, telling your story, and inviting new people to the table. Those three core elements are what makes us, and anyone engaging in this work, a church.

Exactly five minutes after the birth of the Church, it experienced its first conflict. When you tell your faith story, cynics will try to dismiss it by undermining you. In this case, onlookers made the very interesting claim that getting wine drunk during the day makes you bilingual! Since I’ve never seen anyone stepping out of a restaurant bar suddenly fluent in Portuguese, let’s just assume these onlookers were wrong. Peter then delivers his very first sermon, and proclaims that the Holy Spirit changes the entire world in ways that are impossible to miss. Prophesies, mist, fire, blood. And dreams. The Spirit jolts you to attention no matter how apathetic you were before, and then once she has your attention, she fills your mind and heart with the most captivating thoughts of what a better world would look like. She does so much to change your heart and energize your imagination that you can’t resist following her.

Even though Sean’s Gram was a quiet, reserved lady who collected Beanie Babies, I have to believe that the unexpected swift kick of the Holy Spirit switched on her inner rebel, if only for a few minutes every week. That rebellious fire inside of her helped her raise her grandson, face a cancer diagnosis with bravery, and survive her daughter’s tumultuous divorce. This is the faith she needed to renew every week, in the same way you plug in your phone when the battery is low. The Spirit’s fire fills you back up to 100%.

But now, to Sean’s question: does going to church make you a good person? I think that’s up to you. Consider what my mom says about Pentecost being the birth of the Church–do you experience Church that way? Does this place break down your walls, give words to your journey, and compel you to draw the circle wider? It’s subjective, of course, but I think those are the makings of a good person.

But, that doesn’t mean you need to come here to be good, or that you’ll automatically do good in the world because you were here. The Spirit rains that fire down upon you, but what you do when your heart is burning is your move. Fire is a powerful thing. It can damage, destroy, consume, and choke. And we’ve all seen what happens when people become destructive in the name of faith.

But fire can warm, and melt, and shape. It can illuminate, and cook, and prepare. It’s a very powerful tool. And our wall breaking Spirit can reach you wherever you are, even if you call her by a different name, or don’t like the vibes of wooden pews and stained glass windows.

Maybe, instead of worrying about whether going to church makes you good, we should focus on the good we do. Because on this Pentecost day, we rejoice in the Spirit, who draws us all to the fire and then compels us to share her warmth until all the walls between us have been burned down.

Amen.

Hymn Breathe on Me, Breath of God #420

Offering

Offertory

*Doxology #94

*Prayer of dedication

Pastoral Prayer and Lord’s Prayer

(Come, Holy Spirit)

Holy one, we come

ready to receive anew the gifts of your spirit

that will give us vision

to form and reform ourselves as a people of Pentecost.