A Pentecost sermon preached at Holy Love Lutheran Church based on Acts 2 and the presence of the Spirit, with some help from John Green.
When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place, the Parthians, the Medes, the Elamites, the residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, those from Phrygia and Agloe. Suddenly, from heaven, there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, rested on each of them and they began to speak in a great variety of tongues.
Before we meet I go to the chamber of commerce and pick up as many of their free maps of Boulder as I can discreetly sneak out to my car. I hand out markers and I ask students to draw their lives on these maps. Mark the places where you live, where you study, where you go for fun, where you work. Draw the routes. How do you get from one place to the other? What roads or paths do you drive or walk?
We connect the dots and each student ends up with a map of their life. Then we lay all the maps on top of each other, tracing our footsteps over one another. In the end what emerges is a mapping of the life of our small community. But this process produces something else, something that makes maps particularly holy. This map of maps also shows the places we don’t go. It reveals the white spaces; the places we do not go, the places we do not know.
It is this part of the map that is the key to unlocking its sacredness, because what maps do is pull us into the holy place where the things we do know butt up against and touch the things that we do not know. Like the Spirit on Pentecost, maps pull us into the white space, into creative and unknown spaces. They move us into places that before we could only imagine…that had lived only in our imaginations.
There is a childlike element to maps and to that white space. I remember the maps that lined the inside covers of the books I read as a child. The white spaces, the seas in particular, were filled with outrageous pictures of sea monsters and mermaids that drew me into the unknown, into adventure.
Pentecost is quite possibly my favorite day in the lectionary cycle for this same reason. It’s imagery is intense. It’s beyond belief. Flames sit upon the heads of the apostles. The Psalmist writes of God’s glory manifested in sea monsters. We hear of the tower of Babel, when humanity dreamed up a structure so tall that it would reach all the way past the clouds, into the heavens and directly to God.
The stories we tell today aren’t the stories of faith we expect to emerge from an adult bible study. If someone asked most of us to tell them what God is like, I suspect our answers, while just as real and vital, might not be quite so dramatic. No, the stories of Pentecost are the stories are born in elementary Sunday School rooms and in confirmation classes. They’re stories born in the imagination of those who have not yet experienced the sacrament of defeat.
And yet, these are the texts brought to us each year. These are the outrageous stories handed down through the ages, that generation after generation have pointed to say something critically important about God.
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One of the more interesting things I’ve discovered in my recent adventures is the existence of paper towns. (If there are any Nerdfighters among us, you know where I’m going.) You see, ideally one map of the United States should look pretty similar to every other map of the United States. So, what are you to do if you’re a map maker? How do you stop someone from stealing and selling copies of a map you’ve worked very hard to make?
I’ve learned that what you do is sneak a fake town into your map. That way, if you find the town only you know doesn’t exist on someone else’s map, then you know they’ve stolen your work.
If you were paying particularly close attention at the beginning of this sermon and you know your ancient near eastern geography, you would have heard a paper town snuck in among the Medes and Elamites. Agloe is not a place from the bible and for most of history it was never a place at all. But in the early 1930’s Otto G. Lindberg and Ernst Alpers created a map of the United States. They took their initials and mixed them all together,and inserted a paper town called Agloe at the intersection of two dirt roads in upstate New York.
About twenty years later, Rand McNally published their own map of the United States which included, wait for it…Agloe, New York. Otto and Ernst thought they had it made. They were preparing to take Rand McNally to court for what seemed like a simple legal victory…but then…Rand McNally protested.
It turns out that Otto and Ernst’s map had been distributed at Esso Stations across the country. And in the twenty years that passed since they placed a fake town on a real map, Algoe, New York had become a real place. You see, so many people went to look for this town they didn’t think existed that someone decided to open the Agloe General Store at this nondescript intersection of two dirt roads. What had existed only in two men’s imagination became real.
That is the incredibly good news about God; God, you see, is imaginary. Not in the sense that God doesn’t exist or isn’t real or doesn’t matter. Quite to the contrary, the God who comes to us in the winds of the spirit fills our imaginations with dreams and visions beyond the limits of what we think possible. Then, and this is the really important part to hear, God pulls these dreams and visions out of our heads and into our worlds.
May the spirit blow us to the other side of the rainbow. May it blow among the young and the old, through the minds of joyful college students on summer break, and even through the doors of the Agloe General Store. Because with flames on their heads your young men and maidens will dream dreams and your old men and women will see visions of God’s presence in sea monsters and maps and in a piece of bread and cup of wine. These visions, these dreams, will be made real. Amen.
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