May 19, 2013 | 8:00, 9:30, and 11:00 a.m.

Windy City

Calum I. MacLeod
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 104:24–33
Genesis 11:1–9
Acts 2:1–13

“From heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind.”
Acts 2:2 (NRSV)

Come, Holy Spirit:
come, breath of life,
come, fire of love,
come, power of hope,
come, catalyst of God’s kingdom,
come, heavenly friend.

Common Order
Church of Scotland

It was on Mother’s Day some years ago that Missy, Maddy, and I went to celebrate Mother’s Day with a nice brunch at the Drake Hotel just down the road from here. We were given a lovely window seat where we could overlook the junction of Michigan Avenue and Walton Street and see all the goings on on what was a very blustery Sunday morning.

We had much fun looking out and seeing people fighting against the wind and the rain and umbrellas being popped inside out. There was one particular older woman who was having a great struggle crossing Michigan Avenue because of the power of the wind that was howling down Walton Street. It was all somewhat funny until we realized that this elderly lady was struggling so badly that she was unable to cross in time, and the lights had changed so that the cars got the green light. Thankfully everyone held fast and no one moved. Actually, one gentleman got out of his car and helped the lady—kind of pulled her along until she reached the pavement and got into the safety of the lee of the buildings.

It was extraordinary to see the power that the wind had on that day. You all have stories about dealing with weather in this city, the Windy City, as we call it. Even if the origin of that nickname apparently was more to do with political “windbaggery” than with the wind coming off Lake Michigan, you know what it is to be in the Windy City if you stand on the corner of Walton and Michigan—what I think is the windiest corner in the city with the wind blasting off the lake. The Windy City.

Scripture takes us to another windy city today, to the city of Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost, when in that city there is a violent wind that arrives from heaven, the gift of the Holy Spirit. The disciples have gathered in Jerusalem for the Jewish harvest festival of Pentecost, so named because it takes place fifty days after the feast of Passover. The disciples are gathered back in Jerusalem some fifty days after the events of the crucifixion and the mystery of the resurrection. They are there because they are to receive the promised gift of the Holy Spirit, the spirit of the living Christ. And that gift comes in a very elemental fashion first with this violent wind that rushes through the room where the disciples are gathered. And then that other symbol of God’s presence: fire, as what looked like tongues of fire seemed to land above the heads of each the disciples. And then there’s this great gathering of people who come round and the experience of the miracle of speaking in different languages, the miracle of all these people from different parts of the world understanding, in their own language, the message that the disciples are saying. Pentecost in this sense harks back to that story of the Tower of Babel, when because of the people’s hubris, God disperses them and forces them to speak different languages so that they do not understand each other. In a sense, Pentecost turns that on its head: in Pentecost we have the experience of a unity in understanding.

Now I know that we Presbyterians can be a bit uncomfortable when it comes to Pentecost. When it comes to talking about the Holy Spirit, I think we can sometimes be, as Presbyterians, a bit wary. The Holy Spirit, it seems, can cause people to do dangerous things, to be, in a sense, out of control. I got a text on Friday from my colleague, from John Vest, after he’d seen the proof of the bulletin. This morning you may have noted that I replaced the Apostles’ Creed, which we normally say, with text from the most recent confession in our denomination, the Brief Statement of Faith. John texted asking if I was expecting some sort of backlash from the congregation because we were doing something different on this Pentecost Sunday.

I think the Spirit was moving me to be a little on the edge in that we Presbyterians like to say that we do things decently and in order. That’s a direct quote from one of Paul’s letters. And, indeed, when we look at the scriptural witness, we see that even in the early church there was some tension between the freewheeling worship that was done in the Holy Spirit and the calls for there to be more orderly conduct of Christian life and worship. That is essentially what the letter of First Corinthians is dealing with: the questions of order in Christian life and worship.

Perhaps the most dominant description of God’s presence that we find in scripture is that of wind or breath, the wind of God or the breath of God. In the biblical languages, in Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek, these words are synonymous with the word for Spirit, so when we come across the word Spirit in scripture, it can also mean “wind” or “breath.” At the beginning of our biblical witness in the first chapter of Genesis, there are two stories of creation, one the creation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Both are from different traditions but both are unified by the presence of God’s spirit, which is described in Genesis 1 as “the wind of God hovering” and in Genesis 2 as “the breath of God” giving life. It’s the same word. We read together this morning Psalm 104, one of the great psalms of creation in which the psalmist writes, “When you take away your breath, O Lord, they die. When you send forth your spirit they are created.” And then the well-known vision of the prophet Ezekiel as he looks on the valley of the dry bones, where the lifeless broken skeletons are joined together, given muscle and flesh and then life when the Lord says, “I will cause breath to enter you and you shall live.”

This ancient concept of God’s spirit as breath and wind is also picked up by the Gospel writers. The first words that Luke attributes to Jesus are words that Jesus quotes from the prophet Isaiah: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me.” And then in John 3, in the famous episode when Jesus encounters Nicodemus, Jesus says, in the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible that we use, “The wind blows where it chooses” in reference to the action of the Holy Spirit. In the beautiful poetry of the King James Version, that verse goes like this: “The wind bloweth where it listeth and they heareth the sound thereof but can not tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth.”

It’s that wind, that Spirit, that Luke uses to describe the experience the disciples have at Pentecost in Jerusalem. The British writer and theologian Janet Morely describes Pentecost in this way: “Pentecost is the outpouring of the sudden power of God to transform a wounded and disillusioned band of strugglers into a community that changed the world.” Wherever the Holy Spirit, the wind of the spirit moves, we find transformation happening. Today we mark the ninety-ninth anniversary of the opening of this Sanctuary as Judy mentioned earlier. The centenary then of our presence on Michigan Avenue will be next year, and we have a planning group who are already working on plans and ways to mark that important part of our heritage and our history. And I believe that the Holy Spirit was moving one hundred years ago when people from this congregation sought out the visionary pastor, John Timothy Stone, whose vision it was that moved the congregation to this site and to build this Sanctuary.

I believe that the Holy Spirit is present in our life together today. I know that there are eleven members of this church, the Pastor Nominating Committee, who are daily, earnestly invoking the movement of the Holy Spirit in their discernment as to who to recommend as the next candidate to be pastor. And for Missy and I, we find ourselves at a time where we begin to seek to be open to the movement of the Spirit in our lives as we think about our next call and the next phase of my ministry.

Transformation is what the presence of the Spirit brings—sometimes quietly, sometimes like the rush of a violent wind or with tongues of fire. So when we read Genesis, we see that the wind and breath of God are the very agents of creation. It is that which transforms void and chaos into form and meaning, which changes lifeless clay into an animated being. And so with the Spirit’s new creation, the church is born at Pentecost, the Spirit brings meaning out of the hopelessness of the disciples, brings the promise of dreams and visions out of those who were mourning. And so, too, blows the wind of the Spirit in our life today and the lives of those who joined the church, who made profession of faith today, who joined the body of Christ and entered into that relationship that promises healing and wholeness and forgiveness and grace. And the wind blowing daily in our lives. Sometimes disturbing and upsetting are best laid schemes. We see the wind blowing in our communities, in our nation, upsetting the status quo, bringing down the powerful, raising up the humble. And sometimes for us it is that quiet whispering comfort, that experience of the Holy Spirit that hymn writer Brian Wren calls “the breath of love.” And in that breath of love is the closure of Easter, the culmination of the story of death and resurrection. That breath of love speaks to us and says that pain and suffering and death are not the final outcome, but in Desmond Tutu’s words “goodness is stronger than evil, love is stronger than fear, light is stronger than darkness, life is stronger than death.”

Thanks be to God. Amen.