“As the wind passes through the lyre, the strings speak.

So also the Spirit of the Supreme One speaks through my members, 

And I speak through God’s love.” – Odes of Solomon (6:1), a book of early Christian prayers and hymns.

My friends, I pray that we all may know the ways we are instruments for the Holy Spirit, the spirit of God’s Love Supreme, God’s universal mercy. 

One of the blessings and privileges of my role as a pastor, is that I get to receive what people share with me about their religious lives, the why and the wherefore of the living faith of all kinds of folks. It is such a blessing: all these windows into the spiritual dimension of so many different people’s lives. 

On this Pentecost Sunday, our celebration of the transformative spirit alive in Christian community, I want to share with you one of the amazing things I’ve come to learn in my role. 

And that is that the kind of experiences we call religious experiences, experiences of the sacred, experiences of the holy, are not at all unusual. They actually seem to be really quite commonplace. They are extraordinary experiences, but also ordinary: 

All kinds of people from all kinds of walks of life have had some kind of experience of feeling divine grace, or of encountering some holy mystery; a glimpse of the tremendous scope and power of the source of being itself; 

or some experience of being overcome with wonder or beauty that stirs the soul, 

or the experience of just overflowing with gratitude, 

or of being suddenly stunned by the astonishing interconnectedness and interdependence of ourselves with all things; 

or of the miracle that any of us exist at all; or experiences of encounter with others that seem to be beyond space and time and in some cases defy any rational explanation; 

or even those moments in the midst of heartbreak when we are so exhausted by our weeping that we surrender and rest against the support of the earth and, somehow, we simply know in that stillness that the God of all life is with us; 

experiences with community, where we receive the spirit of love and acceptance we so long for;

or experiences where we finally stop fighting against everything that is trying to save us and just let Jesus into our hearts. 

On and on, the experiences of the souls of human beings are so broad and diverse and precious. I love hearing people’s stories about their sacred experiences, small and big. 

Holy moments seem to be scattered indiscriminately across human experience, occurring to every different kind of person, and occurring to people whether we deserve it or not, whether we’re expecting it or not, whether we’re going to let our lives be changed by it or not. It seems to be just a matter of whether it – whether the Holy – catches us in a moment when we’ve happened to let our guard down. 

These are experiences that are small and experiences that are big, experiences we may remember for the rest of our lives, and experiences we may dismiss and forget about, or hide away. If you’re sitting here thinking, “O nothing like that has happened to me,” I encourage you to slow down and see if a memory does come up. We’re all here at worship on Sunday morning for a reason.

One of the challenges is that it can be hard to know how to talk about holy moments. They can seem strange and leave us at a loss. How do you talk about the tremendous mystery that draws us to use this “G-word” when words just kind of break apart when we try to make them fit them around the lives of our souls? 

Another challenge of communicating about our spiritual lives is the fear that someone’s going to think you’re crazy. For example, so many people have shared with me experiences they’ve had around the death of a loved one where they get a very strong message or sense of presence from that loved one who has died. Even being woken up in the middle of the night by grandma saying “goodbye, I love you,” and then minutes later getting the call. These are precious experiences that we may be unsettling enough that we’re reluctant to share them. 

 We just heard that during the Pentecost experience people said about the disciples, that they were “drunk on new wine.” That’s crazy. You’re drunk. You’re high. It’s mental illness. 

(By the way, I just love Peter’s response to people dismissing them for being drunk. It’s so innocent. “We can’t be drunk, it’s only nine in the morning!” O Peter, bless your heart, you must not be an alcoholic.)

So, anyway, we can fear other people dismissing the true richness and sometimes strangeness of our spiritual lives. But we can also dismiss it ourselves. Judge it away, not take it seriously, and not honor it for what it is. Sometimes this can be because of skepticism or fear. 

And sometimes this may be because we think our religious lives need to fit a particular kind of script. But this is about the everyday spirituality of everyday lives of faith. We don’t all need to have stories of mind-blowing revelations on mountaintops. We don’t all need to be able to give testimonials about how our lives were changed in a moment forever when we let Jesus into our hearts. 

Those experiences are important, of course, and their place. 

But for most of us most of the time, the lives of our souls are about daily-bread kind of stuff. You know, little holy moments that may be easy to miss, but we happen to notice this time, and manage not to trample on. It’s beautiful and precious and brief, and often quite humble. Maybe it’s just our heart unclenching a little from its bitterness to let a bit of gratitude in. Praise God for that: that’s mercy enough. Maybe it’s just the little desperate hand holds that helps you through just one more day of sobriety. Praise God for that: that’s mercy enough. These truly are all ways that we can be instruments for the spirit of God’s love, even just a little.

 Now, I wanted to begin by honoring daily-bread kind of spirituality, because today with Pentecost, we are talking about a colossal, cosmic, world-religion-birthing kind of collective religious experience. This happened to a group of folks who weren’t in it for the fireworks, they formed as a community around the daily-bread kind of spirituality that comes when you follow the way of Jesus one step at a time. And on the day in question, this little band had gathered like the rest of their Jewish community for the a daily-bread kind of observance: the holy festival of Pentecost, which is for giving humble thanks and praise to the Almighty Creator for the simple freedom of the Jewish being of having been freed of bondage and being able to enjoy for themselves the bounty of the earth’s harvest. 

But this time, something even more extraordinary happened. When these earnest Jesus-following Jews gathered for this harvest festival, suddenly, 

something like a wind arrives, 

and as it blows through it builds into a torrent, 

and then a tremendous rush of heat and light hits like wildfire, 

and roars with the force of voracious flames, 

the circle of assembled souls ignites, now in the midst of a conflagration, 

this is the Christ-event they saw in Jesus, now unleashed from the singular life of a homeless carpenter’s son, unleashed into a Spirit that consumes the matchstick frames of any separate self and draws us all into the fiery vortex of the Love Supreme, 

blowing past the bounds of generations and time, 

incinerating the circumference of the universe itself. 

Holy! Holy! Holy!

And when that circle of Christ-people, so aflame, arise in that conflagration of the spirit, 

they sing out like harp-strings buzzing in a windstorm, 

singing out that Holy Love Supreme, the harmonics of Universal Mercy, 

their souls humming in harmony with the realm of heaven on heart. 

And all who heard them out on the streets heard them singing words in their mother-tongue, words that stirred that ancient part of their souls, stirred them awake, drawing them also to the light and heat of the Spirit now afire around them. 

They too erupt in the flames of divine Love. 

They too become instrument for the Spirit of the Christ event.

We can’t fully know what that experience was like for those who were there that day. Words can only bring us so far. The words I have just used to retell the story come from the ways the Pentecost story resonates with brushes with the Holy Spirit that I have happened to experience. 

Whatever happened on that day, we know that that event among that circle of Jesus-following friends opened the way for the Christ-Spirit to pour out in a way that has reverberated across communities and cultures and through the generations out to the present day. 

And as amazing as the story may seem, it is about the Spirit that we all are acquainted with in one way or another, whether we fully realize it or not. You wouldn’t be here right now if that weren’t true. 

It is the Spirit that is alive in all that is vital and life-giving within communities centered around God as revealed in the Jesus way. 

When it comes to the Holy Spirit, even a yearning is enough. Do you yearn for it? That’s enough; that’s huge. That comes from the Holy Spirit. Even just saying a little “yes” to a bit of the Spirit, like when we simply accept an act of kindness out of our own need, with a little gratitude. That’s enough; that’s huge. Even one sincere word of prayer. That’s enough; that’s huge. Or one moment where we let the beauty rush in. That’s enough; that’s huge. These are all little ways we become like harps singing in the wind. 

            Now, amazing experiences of the Holy Spirit are much more commonplace than perhaps we may think. It is important to honor and share, and testify, with humility, knowing that it is much more important that we honor and share and testify to the daily-bread kind of spirituality that in the end is what actually helps us grow as ensouled human beings, walking together on this Jesus-road of becoming, little by little, more open to being instruments for the universal mercy and love supreme of our God. 

We need it, and the world needs it. There’s just too much suffering for us to dismiss the ways the Holy Spirit is at work on us, for us not to acknowledge and receive and share the gifts of the Holy Spirit we are indeed receiving. The world needs us all to become instruments for God’s love. I am so grateful to be doing that with you. 

            Thanks be to God. 

(Delivered Pentecost Sunday, June 5th 2022, at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg)

Image: “wind-harp-burning-man-2013” by Curtis Simmons is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.