There is a story that has populated sermons in some traditions for decades. A lifesaving station began as a ramshackle hut with devoted volunteers who braved storms to rescue shipwreck victims. Many lives were saved and soon the station became famous. As their fame grew, so did the desire of others to be associated with their work. Money was raised for new boats, more training, more crews. The hut, too, was replaced by a comfortable building that could handle the needs of those who had been saved from the sea. Since shipwrecks don’t happen every day, it also became a sort of social club. As time passed, those who gathered became so engaged in being together that they lost interest in lifesaving. When people were actually rescued, it was kind of a nuisance because those rescued were dirty and sick and soiled the carpeting. Soon, the social activities of the club became so numerous, and the lifesaving activities so few, that there was a showdown at a club meeting, with some insisting the club return to its original purpose. A vote was taken. Those wanting to return to the original purpose were a tiny minority; they were invited to leave and start another club on their own terms. Which is what they did, just a little down the coast. They did so with selflessness and daring in saving lives. And after a while, their heroism made them famous. Whereupon their membership was enlarged, their hut reconstructed … and you can guess how it went from there. If you happen to visit that area today, you will find a number of exclusive clubs dotting the shoreline. Shipwrecks still occur in those parts, but nobody seems to notice much. Were it not for Pentecost, this could have happened to the fragile community formed by the first followers of Jesus Christ after his death and resurrection. Do you remember where you were or what you were doing on Monday, April 6? April 6 was the day after Easter Day. Had anything changed? We’d delivered our Easter sermons with extra preparation and focus. The sanctuary was fuller than usual, the lilies were fragrant, the alleluias rang out. And then … Monday arrived. The normal rhythm resumed. The routine reasserted itself. What changed? In the gospel accounts, even though we have these post-Easter appearances of Jesus, his followers don’t really stop long enough to enter a whole new life. A slightly remodeled life, perhaps, but like all of us, it appears they didn’t like their routine overly disrupted. There is always the temptation to live most of life on automatic pilot. The National Transportation Safety Board has warned that “humans are not good monitors of highly automated systems for extended periods of time.”¹ As one veteran pilot noted, “No light comes on to tell you that you’re being complacent.”² Pentecost moves Easter out into the world—and deep into our lives—where “automatic pilot” is just no way to live. Nevertheless, Easter’s promise and urgency get co-opted all the time. Our culture tends to turn Jesus into whatever people seem to need Jesus to be, no matter how far away it is from the life of grace and hope that Jesus lived for and died for. One follower of the Easter Jesus recently put it this way:

The other night I headed downtown for a stroll with some friends from out of town. We walked along the river, where there are street performers, artists, musicians. We passed a great magician who did some pretty sweet tricks like pour change out of his iPhone, and then there was a preacher. He wasn’t quite as captivating as the magician. He stood on a box, yelling into a microphone, and beside him was a coffin with a fake dead body inside. He talked about how we are all going to die and go to hell if we don’t know Jesus. Some folks snickered. Some told him to shut the hell up. A couple of teenagers tried to steal the dead body in the coffin. All I could do was think to myself, I want to jump up on a box beside him and yell at the top of my lungs, “God is not a monster.” Maybe next time I will.

Shane Claiborne, the one recounting all this, reflected on the experience: “The more I have read the Bible and studied the life of Jesus, the more I have become convinced that Christianity spreads best not through force but through fascination. But over the past few decades our Christianity, at least here in the United States, has become decreasingly fascinating. We have given the atheists less to disbelieve. And the sort of Christianity many of us have seen on TV and heard on the radio looks less and less like Jesus.”³ Thomas Merton identified this hazard in New Seeds of Contemplation: “There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence … activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects … is to succumb to violence … It destroys the fruitfulness of [one’s] own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”⁴ Pentecost is the gift of fascination. Renewing. Enlivening. Delighting. Full of mystery and hope as it stops cold all attempts by those who want to turn God into a monster. Jesus really did mean that the way of love is the way of life. Jesus really did intend for peace to rule and justice to prevail. The triumph over the cross was a triumph over everything ugly we do to ourselves and to others. It is the final promise that love prevails. Against all odds, love overcomes. Pentecost is the promise that the Spirit of the Risen Christ shows up every time Easter is about to be co-opted or manipulated or corrupted. It is the voice of Pentecost that says: “Not that way … this way. Not for your own aims … but for God’s sake!” Jesus really meant all he lived for and all he died for. Eugene Peterson addressed this in his work, arguing that pastors face constant temptation to become “shopkeepers” rather than spiritual guides—managing religious goods and services rather than attending to prayer, scripture, and spiritual direction. When preaching becomes primarily about effectiveness—measured by attendance, positive feedback, or ministerial reputation—we’ve shifted into shopkeeper mode. In this light, Pentecost becomes a product to be marketed rather than a prophetic word to be received and delivered.⁵ Simone Weil understood attention as a fundamentally spiritual practice. In Waiting for God, she wrote: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” She wasn’t speaking of mere concentration, but of a quality of presence that empties itself of preoccupation to genuinely receive reality: “Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by the object.”⁶ In this case, Pentecost is both the object of our attention and our shepherd into a world of engagement, for God’s sake. In a sermon on this text, William Willimon, a generous contributor to JP, said:

I saw the expansive Acts 2 reach of God in the great mosaic at the church in Monreale, Sicily. It is a wonder of the medieval world. There, presiding over a dazzling array of jewel-like depictions of the story of our salvation, is Christ Creator of all. Having seen photographs of that mosaic, I expected to be bedazzled by the Byzantine otherness of Christ, Christ the Judge of humanity. And yet the Christ I saw was Christ of the wide embrace, hands outstretched, reaching out from his majesty as if to encircle the whole church, the whole creation in his reach. All the stories of scripture—told with such wondrous vitality in the mosaics of Monreale—are vignettes of this grand vision of a God who is stubbornly determined to embrace all of humanity. Leaving the church at Monreale, a street vendor held up a trinket with Christ’s picture stamped upon it. “Don’t you want to take a little Jesus with you, mister?” he asked. But no, I realized, we don’t take Christ with us—Christ always takes us places.⁷

This reversal matters profoundly for preaching. Spirit-empowered proclamation doesn’t offer a portable, controllable Jesus who endorses our preferences. Instead, it surrenders to a Christ who propels us toward uncomfortable truths and demanding ministries. The preacher becomes less a dispenser of religious goods and more a witness to where the Spirit is already moving. The Spirit of the Risen Christ given to us on Pentecost is the Spirit that reinforces the truth that Jesus really did mean everything he lived for and everything he died for. And that life, that death, that resurrection, this Spirit propels us into the world. This Holy Spirit of propulsion may drive you into the streets to set things right, it may cause you to leave the comforts of home for the next challenge, or it may drive you to return to the home where those who have known you longest and know you best offer their embrace. You may be propelled to Washington DC, or to your State Capitol or to City Hall. Then again, you may find yourself discovering yourself holding the hand of one at a bedside, or folding your hands in prayer, or accompanying a friend to an AA meeting. The Spirit of Pentecost can propel you to raise your voice, or to learn to listen more carefully than you’ve ever done before. Wherever the Spirit moves you—make no mistake—God is speaking, and God is telling us that Jesus really meant all the things he lived for and died for. In The Spiritual Life Of Children, Robert Coles writes about Ginny, a young girl from a poor family who is bright, articulate, imaginative, and has a keenly developed spirituality. Ginny recounts, for example, that her uncle, who was wounded in Vietnam, is still nervous and upset, still prone to frequent crying. Ginny wonders how God must have felt during the violence of the war. “If my uncle cries now,” she reflects, “God must have cried, too. “God must have wept, don’t you think?” One day, Ginny was walking home and, along the way, encountered an elderly woman who seemed lost and confused. Ginny asked the woman if she needed help, and the woman, in relief, responded: “If you could, that would be wonderful.” Ginny discovered that the woman had been walking to visit her daughter but had gotten disoriented. Although Ginny was late for her home chores, she sensed that getting this troubled stranger safely to her destination was the chore she most needed to be doing. So she traveled with her, talked gently to her, listened to her as the woman spoke of the pain of her life, and guided her to her daughter’s house. When they arrived and Ginny started to leave, the woman grasped her arm and announced that God had sent Ginny to her, and that later she would pray a prayer of thanks to God for having Ginny there. On the way home, Ginny wondered what it would be like to be old, wondered if she were old and in need, if God would send some kid like her to help. “Maybe God puts you here,” Ginny thought, “and … gives you these hints of what’s ahead, and you should pay attention to them, because that’s God speaking to you.”⁸ Pentecost is the remarkable gift of being spiritually alert and being open to holy interruptions, all at once. That balance—that art—requires the Spirit’s transformative presence. Jesus really did mean all that he lived for and all that he died for. And just to make sure we understand that, at Pentecost we are given the Spirit to propel us into those places we may not go on our own. Pentecost is Easter extended. Pentecost texts seek to sing Easter’s song in all times and in all places. In 1972, two years before Duke Ellington died, Yale University held a gathering of leading black jazz musicians to raise money for a department of African American music. Aside from Ellington, the musicians who came for three days of concerts, jam sessions, and workshops included Eubie Blake, Noble Sissle, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Mary Lou Williams, and Willie (the Lion) Smith. During a performance by a Gillespie-led sextet, someone, evidently unhappy with his presence on campus, called in a bomb threat. The police attempted to clear the building, but Mingus refused to leave, urging the officers to get all the others out but adamantly remaining onstage with his bass. “Racism planted that bomb, but racism ain’t strong enough to kill this music,” he was heard telling the police captain. “If I’m going to die, I’m ready. But I’m going out playing Sophisticated Lady.” Once outside, Gillespie and his group set up again. But coming from inside was the sound of Mingus intently playing Ellington’s dreamy thirties hit, which, that day, became a protest song, as the performance kept going on and on and getting hotter. In the street, Ellington stood in the waiting crowd just beyond the theatre’s open doors, smiling. ⁹ This way forward requires shifts in how we understand our calling: First, we must abandon the illusion of control. Spirit-empowered preaching means yielding our carefully crafted messages to the possibility of divine interruption. Like Mingus refusing to stop playing despite the bomb threat, we continue proclaiming Easter’s reality even when it feels dangerous or foolish. Second, we must recover fascination over force. As Claiborne observed, Christianity spreads through fascination, not coercion. Our preaching should emanate wonder at God’s persistent love rather than desperation to scare people into belief. The Spirit makes the gospel compelling; we simply bear witness. Third we must trust that Jesus meant everything he lived for and died for. In a time when our culture is seeking to water down and obscure truth, righteousness, insight, and wisdom, Pentecost insists that there can be no hedging, no qualifying, no softening the radical demands of grace. The Spirit reinforces this truth, preventing us from domesticating Jesus into manageable proportions. Fourth, we must recognize that we don’t take Christ with us—Christ takes us places. Our sermons should prepare congregations not to possess Jesus but to be possessed by him, not to control the Spirit but to be caught up in the Spirit’s movement. And, in the same spirit, our sermons cannot be just our own best take on “where things stand” or “what I think we need to do” but rather the utter obedience and freedom to allow Jesus Christ to take us along for his journey and for his purposes. Finally, we must cultivate the spiritual practices that train attention and resist autopilot. This requires intentional discipline: stepping away from the algorithms that profit from your anxiety, sitting in silence before you preach, finding people who’ll check in on how you’re actually doing, and taking real breaks so your mind can stop spinning. But ultimately, it requires dependence on the Spirit—the very power that won’t let Easter remain a comfortable tradition, that insists resurrection changes everything, that propels us beyond our careful planning into genuine encounter with the living God. Pentecost keeps playing the song of Easter and plays it with such passion, such fascination, such protest, such joy … that it just keeps going on and on, getting hotter and hotter. It catches you up in its wake and moves you into what Jesus cared about most: a day shaped by attention, purpose, and propulsion. A life filled with hope and love, occupied in bringing peace to the world, engaged in opening the spigots of justice so it can roar down like an ever-flowing stream. Jesus really did care about all the things he lived for and all the things he died for. At Pentecost, the Spirit of the Risen Christ has shown up, and Easter’s power just keeps going on and on and on. And we get to pay attention. We are caught up in God’s purposes. And we are propelled—as Christ’s beloved community—into God’s world of hope and possibility.

Notes

1. National Transportation Safety Board. Collision Between Vehicle Controlled by Developmental Automated Driving System and Pedestrian, Tempe, Arizona, March 18, 2018. NTSB/HAR-19/03, 19 Nov. 2019. Concurring Statement. “Human attention span is limited, and we are notoriously poor monitors.”
2. “As Attention Wanders, Rethinking Autopilot” by Chrstine Negroni, The New York Times, May 18. 2020
3. Shane Claiborn, Esquire, October 2019
4. Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation. New Directions, 1961, pp 15-16
5. Eugene H. Peterson, Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987).
6. Simone Weil, Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009, p. 105.
7. William Willimon, Pulpit Resource, Logos Productions, May 2010
8. Robert Coles, The Spiritual Life of Children, HarperOne, 1991
9. “Black, Brown, and Beige: Duke Ellington’s music and race in America” by Claudia Roth Pierpont, The New Yorker, May 17, 2010