May 24, 2026
I think it was four years ago when I ordered a hundred of these red pinwheels. Pentecost was coming, and I thought, “Wow, those would be a great thing to have for Pentecost.” And the hundred got here, and they had to be assembled.
And I had two days.
They did not get assembled that year, or the next year, or the year after that. They disappeared on a bookshelf until I found them this past winter. Then I came up here with them, and I was introduced to Sally and told what Sally can pull off.
And I said, “Here you go, Sally. The kids could put these together.”
But I love the idea of these pinwheels. Because as I move them around, as the air blows, I don’t even have to do anything. Look at Gary’s pinwheel. He’s not doing a thing. Just going.
That’s some solid magic right there.
They are moved by the air. By the wind. Another word for spirit.
They’re a great symbol and reminder for us of what God does. We don’t have to fully understand it. I noticed that if I have it this way, I have to blow on the bottom. If I have it this way, I have to blow on the top to get it to go. I can walk around, and if I walk fast enough, the pinwheel just starts going.
“Hm? So fast?”
You don’t understand how slow I normally walk.
The Spirit is moving.
These pinwheels can remind us constantly, even if we don’t notice it. Even if we are not attentive to it.
The Spirit is moving.
And it’s not about creating the exact circumstances we think we need for the Spirit to move. Instead, it is trusting that God is up to something in this world, and seeing where and how we can catch that wind. Where and how it might blow and help us to move and to be moved in this world.
It’s easy to forget.
It’s easy to think that we have to do it on our own.
Kelly starts every service with a reminder. Breathe in. Breathe out.
That connects us with the Holy Spirit. Because breath is the Spirit. The same words, both in Hebrew and in Greek, mean wind, mean spirit, and mean breath.
And so when you breathe, you are breathing in the life-giving Spirit. You’re breathing out goodness into the world. We don’t have to do anything to receive that breath except open up our diaphragms to allow it in.
Pentecost is a reminder that God is not asking us to wait for perfect circumstances, but instead to wait for what God is doing in the world.
Do any of y’all have in mind what you would do if you won the lottery? Raise your hand. You’ve given it a little bit of thought?
I’ve got big plans. I’m going to fix a lot of things. Because if I had that much money, imagine what I could do. Right?
Imagine what we could do in our own lives, in the lives of our family and our friends, and in the lives of the world around us. If only those circumstances were just so.
The disciples in the book of Acts kind of seem to have this same idea of, “We’ve got to get things just right, and then God can move through us.”
You see in chapter 1, Jesus says, “Okay, y’all wait until the Spirit comes.” And then he ascends into heaven.
And the disciples go to the upper room, and they’re hanging out, and they’re like, “What are we supposed to do? We’ve got to do something, right? Okay, all this waiting’s getting annoying.”
Anybody in here ever been told to wait and you don’t know how to do it?
The disciples are right there with you.
And they look around and they go, “Hey, I know what the problem is. I know why the Spirit hasn’t come yet. There are only 11 of us. Jesus called 12. So, we need to replace Judas. We need a 12th disciple. We need to bring in that last guy. And once we elect this 12th disciple…”
Well, they don’t elect him. They just basically roll some dice for him, cast lots.
“Once we figure out who the 12th person is, then God’s Spirit will come.”
And they get the 12th disciple, the replacement for Judas. And you know how many more times we hear this guy’s name?
Zero.
We hear it just when they say, “Matthias was selected.” And we never hear of Matthias again.
Not because Matthias doesn’t do anything, but because it didn’t really matter that they had a 12th disciple. Matthias was going to be able to fulfill his calling and his gifting by the Spirit whether he was number 12 or whether he was not numbered at all.
And you may actually notice in this morning’s reading, it says Peter stood up with the 11. Luke is making a point. The circumstances didn’t have to get made right.
The question isn’t, “Is the world the way that we need it to be, prepared for us to go and do what we want to do?” It’s not a question of, “Are the circumstances finally just so?”
It’s a question of, “Is the Spirit moving?”
Is the wind blowing?
I actually noticed a couple people, once the wind started during the scripture reading, when I got to the tongues of flame part, looked up. Just checking. Making sure.
Okay, no tricks. Okay.
And the thing is, it doesn’t always move the same way.
Each year, it’s important to remember the chaos that the Spirit caused. It’s actually the chaos of what the Spirit is doing that gets the attention of all the people who come and hear what the disciples have to say.
This is not some orderly kind of thing. There’s no call to worship. There’s no time of prayer.
Instead, they’re waiting, and they don’t know what they’re waiting for, and they don’t know what’s happening. And then there is a rushing wind, and a flame lands on their heads.
Anybody else looking for a fire extinguisher in that situation?
I don’t know what is going on.
It is not about what the disciples have become proficient in. It is not that they got all the answers to Jesus’ pop quizzes throughout the Gospels, because we know oftentimes they got the answers wrong to those pop quizzes. And sometimes they threw a pop quiz at themselves, only to get the answers wrong there, too.
It is the fact that the Spirit is moving.
That this is what God is about in the world: proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ to all who can possibly hear it.
And the Spirit will give them the words and the gifts that are necessary for that to happen.
I love the list. The list of the different people who can suddenly understand the language. I love the list mainly because it includes the Cretans.
A Cretan’s a bad guy, right?
You ever call somebody a Cretan? Or seen it in the movies?
The Bible includes in that list a group of people that were so despised that today, I don’t even…
Could anybody find Crete on a map?
But as soon as you got called a Cretan, you know you’re doing something wrong, right? We all know it.
The Cretans are included.
Even their language gets spoken.
So whatever negative term you have going in your head about somebody, know that God is trying to tell that person, that group:
I love you. Receive redemption.
The work of Pentecost is the redemption of all.
It is the redemption of all of us. It doesn’t matter what we may have been called by ourselves or by other people. God wants us to know that we are loved.
They got up and they told the people, “Jesus came, and he walked this earth, and he lived, and he taught, and he died, and he rose again so that they may receive redemption.”
It didn’t matter who they were.
Even the Cretans.
Even the fill-in-the-blank-yourself.
That is the work that we celebrate today, and it is the work that we are called to as followers of Jesus Christ and as those who have received the gift of the Spirit.
We may not understand it. We may not get it. But that is what God is up to.
And when we are trying to get in tune with the Spirit, we must wait. We must wait so that we can learn how to speak that love and that goodness.
And when…
Y’all, it comes out of me, too.
When that anger or that frustration or that hatred wants to come out of our mouths, we’ve got to learn how to wait.
We’ve got to learn to allow the Spirit to transform the words that we want to come out of our mouths into something better. Something redemptive. Something that may speak love and hope into the lives of those who are around us.
For a while, I would hear some folks talk about millennials. And they said the word like it was a dirty word.
“Those millennials.”
Y’all, I entered youth ministry to the millennials.
And what I experienced with the millennials is a group of people who wanted to impact the world. Who wanted to feed people who were hungry.
The biggest youth event I ever had with any youth group was a two-night, 40-hour fast.
I could get 10 people to my youth group for a fun game night. Thirty-five kids would show up to not eat for 40 hours together. Because we were raising money for people who were hungry.
Sometimes we don’t speak the same language as them.
Sometimes we don’t understand what they’re doing. Whether it’s Gen X or Boomers or Millennials or Gen Z or Gen Alpha.
I said several months ago in a sermon, I said “six or seven” something, and one of the youth just started laughing. And I thought I’d made a great point.
I had not.
And then he did this, and I went, “Oh my gosh, I said it in a sermon. I can’t believe I did that.”
Those differences in language aren’t just about English or Spanish or French or Chinese. They’re differences in what we know, what we’re able to talk about, and when we don’t try to find ways to cross those divides to allow the Spirit to teach us and show us new and different ways.
When we don’t do that, we become further and further separated. We become more and more stratified, and we become less and less like the kingdom of God.
The challenge that we are given by Pentecost is to say we can overcome, with the help of the Holy Spirit, all which seems to divide us. And that is what the Spirit is up to.
The beautiful thing about the Acts passage is that Pentecost, to the Jewish people, was just 50 days after Passover.
The central thing was Passover. It was just another festival. It wasn’t like nothing, but it was kind of…
Actually, ironically, it falls on Memorial Day.
It’s kind of a secondary holiday.
Not because it should have been a secondary holiday. Not because Memorial Day should be a secondary holiday. But it’s not like Christmas or Easter or the 4th of July.
And for the Jewish people, they had already gathered and done Passover, the big thing. Pentecost was simply related to it.
So it’s more of an ordinary day.
Until the Spirit comes.
In those days, Acts says.
In those days, the prophet Joel says, the Spirit of God will move.
And it’s not about that it’s some sort of special day. Instead, it’s today.
In the days in which we live, the Spirit is moving and seeking to bring healing and hope, wholeness and love, grace and mercy into this world.
It is moving in and around us, through and among us, so that we may help bring about a world that is more like God made it to be.
Joel says, “It will give us visions and dreams.”
I’m not going to delineate between the old and the young. If you’re dreaming dreams or you’re seeing visions, doesn’t matter.
It means that the Spirit is upon you and showing you what that better world will look like. It is challenging us to imagine what the world will look like when God’s kingdom has come.
Challenging us not just to imagine it, but then to trust that the Spirit is carrying us towards it. Because I’ve got to be honest, there are times I don’t know how we’re going to get there.
Anybody else in here wonder if we’re ever going to get to that blessed state of peace?
That blessed state of goodness?
That blessed state of wholeness and reunification with God and with one another, and in fact, just within our own selves?
The Spirit will gift us and guide us.
We don’t have to get there on our own.
For the next seven weeks, we’re going to be talking about this:
Imagining a world with more.
More compassion.
More community.
More hope.
More love.
More justice.
More spirit.
More life itself.
There are times, y’all, that I feel like I’m just walking around like a zombie. Just going through the motions.
There are times when it’s just day after day.
Isn’t life more than that?
Isn’t the Spirit calling us to something more than that? Fuller? More abundant?
Isn’t that something that we want?
We have to look for it. We have to accept it. We have to receive the gift that God is offering to us, giving to us free of charge, so that we can step into a fuller, better life.
Quick question for y’all.
Which is better, a vegetable out of your garden or a vegetable out of the produce section?
The garden.
We all know it.
But that takes a lot more work, right? It takes a lot more attention.
Thank goodness for the rain, y’all.
We got our garden in the ground two weeks ago, and then it started raining. I was like, “Oh my gosh. This never happens.”
Normally, I get the garden in the ground and it’s like, “Oh, okay, drought coming next month.”
But it’s fuller.
It’s better.
The Spirit is calling us not to accept a cheap, zombified version where we are already walking around in death’s clutches. Instead, it is calling us to live a full and abundant life. A life that is full of joy.
Y’all, I don’t know if you heard it earlier this morning, but I said, “It’s the greatest noise, I think, in the whole world.”
Out here in the coffee area, I think it was Addison playing with Scotty, and his giggles were going through the roof.
Man, we need that.
We need the fullness of that kind of joy, that kind of laughter. We need the fullness of the tears that are life. We need all of that because the Spirit has given it to us, and God has gifted us with the ability to have that kind of fullness.
And we’re better for it.
The challenge of Pentecost, the challenge of life in the Spirit, is not to accept the knockoff version because it’s easier.
But instead, to take the way that Jesus calls the narrow way.
The way that requires.
Yes, it’ll feel like more.
Right up until it doesn’t.
Because then we will remember what it is to be fully alive.
There’s one last word in there:
Imagine a world with more beauty.
Where do you see beauty right now?
Where have you seen beauty just this morning?
And actually paid attention to it?
Y’all, I drive up through these mountains three times a week. And so often I’m just trying to get here, and I’m not paying attention to the incredible beauty of it.
It’s easy when we’re used to the way things are to ignore, to miss the beauty of the flames of the Spirit up here in the ministry.
Y’all, I got brought in here earlier this morning.
When I came in Thursday, there were some things up, but that wasn’t up yet.
It’s incredible.
I love it.
There is beauty right here. Right around us. Right now.
We’ve got to stop.
We’ve got to pay attention to it.
There is life. There is goodness. There is compassion. There is community.
Y’all, do we realize how blessed we are that we have all the people in here for each other?
That we have a place where we can come and be loved, not because of anything other than who we are?
The Spirit has brought us here.
The Spirit has fallen upon us.
And it gifts us that we might offer that more that God has planted in our hearts and in our lives to the world around us. To all.
In those days, the Spirit of God will fall upon them.
Those days are today.
And the Spirit of God is moving among us.
Amen.