A Sermon by Pastor Tom Lacey . . .

A God on the Move

Acts 2:1-21, Preached at Congregational Church of Boca Raton, May 27, 2007

One night, a hotel guest steps into the hallway to go to the ice machine and accidentally locks himself out. The problem is he is in his underwear. Knowing he has no choice, the guest goes downstairs, across the lobby and up to the front desk. He asks for another key to his room. The young lady looks at him and says, "I'm sorry, sir, but before I give you another key, I need to see some identification." Now that's power.

Our text this morning makes it clear that the task ahead of us is never as great as the Power behind us. If you’re ever in doubt about how far you can go, just remember the reason you’re going in the first place. When you have a great reason, you can go a great distance. When we have little purpose, we make little gains.

Look at Peter in our text. This is the same man who couldn’t tell a serving woman at midnight the truth about Jesus. Now here he is in broad daylight, proclaiming the word to anyone and all who will listen. What’s the difference? Just two things: Jesus gave them their great reason before he left them for good, saying, “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” And then the Spirit of God touched his heart. After this, nobody could stop him. When just a day before Peter was neither courageous nor qualified enough for the job at hand, the Spirit changed all that.

If you’re struggling day to day, you’re in need of some power. Don’t be afraid of the Spirit. Willpower comes from the Spirit. So let the passion in. Accept God’s purpose that inspires you to do something new. Let the power of God come upon you. Where there is Spirit, there is life, and the life of Christ. This is so important that when a traveling evangelist went to preach at a church, he would secretly hire a small boy to sit in the rafters with a dove in a cage. Toward the end of his sermon, the preacher would shout for the Holy Spirit to come down, and the boy would release the dove. At one meeting however, the dove did not fly down from the rafters. The evangelist exclaimed, “Come Down Holy Spirit!" Still no sign of the dove. Then the preacher heard a loud whisper coming from the rafters, “Sir, a yellow cat just ate the Holy Spirit. Shall I throw down the yellow cat?” Something’s gotta come down on us!

What we want to see this morning is just how important the Holy Spirit is.

Our classic scripture story of the beginning of the Church makes the point loud and clear. Even Jesus in the flesh and the Risen Christ himself can’t create the Church. Only the Holy Spirit can. As Scripture says, “As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons and daughters of God.” Romans 8.9 It is perhaps unfortunate that we often speak of the events at Pentecost as the coming of the Holy Spirit. Just so we remember, the Spirit is eternally with God and is God. The Holy Spirit spoke to David; the Spirit spoke through Isaiah. The Spirit is God in every age revealing God’s truth to all those who listen and obey. Yet on Pentecost, something special definitely happened. We may never know precisely what occurred but we do know that it was one of the supremely great days of the Christian Church. The Holy Spirit came upon the first disciples with power, and caused them to burst forth from their little upper room safety and out onto the streets of the world. By the Spirit the Christian Church was first established and recognized as something different. This is the gist of Peter’s sermon that we read this morning. These aren’t inebriated people; these are inspired people. You know, nothing can replace the Spirit’s power in our lives. Without it we feel dead, with it we can do anything. We may try to find substitutes, but having a passion and a purpose cannot be faked by other means. Our conscience, our souls know the difference. So when lightning strikes grab it. When God calls, listen. When the Spirit, moves, follow. 

The United Church of Christ is the denomination of which this church is a part. One of our slogans comes from Gracie Allen, wife of George Burns. She said, “Never place a period where God has placed a comma.” She makes a good point. God is on the move, and will not be stopped. The best is yet to come.

The UCC and its forebears, the Congregationalists, the Christian Church, the Evangelical Synod, and the German Reformed Church, which together became the UCC in 1957, have had a history of not placing a period where God is placing a comma. This is a history of which we can be very proud, and which should instruct us today. In 1620, seeking spiritual freedom, forbears of the UCC prepare to leave Europe for the New World. Later known as the Pilgrims, their pastor, John Robinson, urges them as they depart to keep their minds and hearts open to new ways. “God,” he says, “has yet more light and truth to break forth out of his holy Word.” The Congregational churches founded by the Pilgrims and other spiritual reformers spread rapidly through New England. In an early experiment in democracy, each congregation is self-governing and elects its own ministers. The Congregationalists aim to create a model for a just society lived in the presence of God. Their leader, John Winthrop, prays that "we shall be as a city upon a hill ... the eyes of all people upon us." The commitment of those who walked before us to education and higher learning was deep. Both Harvard (1636) and Yale (1701) were founded out of that vision. So were eight historically black colleges and universities in the South, schools that continue today as places of nurture and education for the children of this generation. Also founded by our UCC forebears were Wellesley, Smith, Dartmouth, Williams, Amherst, Oberlin, Mount Holyoke, Howard, Elmhurst and UC Berkeley.

In 1700, the Rev. Samuel Sewall writes the first anti-slavery pamphlet in America, "The Selling of Joseph." Sewall lays the foundation for the abolitionist movement that comes more than a century later. In 1773, in the first act of civil disobedience, five thousand angry colonists gather in the Old South Meeting House to demand repeal of an unjust tax on tea. Their protest inspires the first act of civil disobedience in U.S. history—the "Boston Tea Party." In 1777, the British occupy Philadelphia—seat of the rebellious Continental Congress—and plan to melt down the Liberty Bell to manufacture cannons. But the Bell has disappeared. It is safely hidden under the floorboards of Old Zion Reformed Church in Allentown. In 1785, Lemuel Haynes is the first African American ordained by a Protestant denomination. He becomes a world-renowned preacher and writer.

In 1853, Antoinette Brown is the first woman since New Testament times ordained as a Christian minister, and perhaps the first woman in history elected to serve a Christian congregation as pastor. At her ordination a friend, Methodist minister Luther Lee, defends "a woman's right to preach the Gospel." He quotes the New Testament: "There is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

St. Louis, MO was frontier in the late 1880s and home to many new German immigrants. To meet the urgent need for medical care, the Evangelical Deaconess Society and the Evangelical Deaconess Home and Hospital were founded. Katherine Haack, a trained nurse and widow of an Evangelical pastor, was the first deaconess to be consecrated. At a time when women were often silenced at church, women such as Haack were leaders in the administration and guidance of the home and hospital. The Deaconess movement led to the establishment of 16 hospitals and institutions for healthcare and nurse training. More than 500 deaconess sisters were trained to provide professional but also loving and spiritual care for the sick, aged and dying

In 1943, Evangelical and Reformed theologian Reinhold Niebuhr preaches a sermon that introduces the world to the now famous Serenity Prayer: "God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other." In 1959, Southern television stations impose a news blackout on the growing civil rights movement, and Martin Luther King Jr. asks the UCC to intervene. Everett Parker of the UCC's Office of Communication organizes churches and wins in Federal court a ruling that the airwaves are public, not private property.

I am going to stop here. The UCC has done many more things, forward-moving things since then. As we look back at our country’s history, and we see the way in which our forbears and the United Church of Christ have proved to be correct in the stances we have taken, it is easy for me to say that I believe we are on the side of God’s history, working with the Holy Spirit to fulfill God’s will for his creation, his church, and his children. It is to this history which we as God’s people and his body here should be loyal, and by being loyal we will know the work of the Spirit within this church’s life.

Let’s not pretend to be church; let’s be the real church. And only a people who seek to fulfill God’s call and be moved by a God on the move shall accomplish the Lord’s purpose. So find a prayerful heart and mind for this church. Ask the Spirit to lead you in a courageous way. Let God’s hand fall upon you, to stand you up, to strengthen your back, to lift you from drooping knees, to encourage your heart, and to give you sight, so that you may see what God has prepared for you to see.

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