Inside-Out Religion

Acts 2:1-21 (Year A, Pentecost Sunday)

Fred Craddock once told the story of driving through Anderson County, Tennessee, searching for a little church he’d served decades ago as a student pastor. It had been a difficult congregation. When he proposed they reach out to newcomers moving into the area — folks living in trailers near the expanding Oak Ridge National Lab — the deacons weren’t exactly enthusiastic. “They wouldn’t fit in here,” came the response. Which raises the question: fit in where, exactly? Heaven has a pretty loose dress code.

A congregational vote followed. One long-time member moved that membership require ownership of property in the county. It passed. Fred voted no. Everybody else voted yes. Democracy in action — which, as Churchill noted, is the worst system except for all the others. Apparently including this one.

Years later, Fred and his wife Nettie returned to find the old church. They came around a curve and there it was — tall, white clapboard, steeple and all. And the parking lot was full. Young and old. Black and white. Luxury cars. Beat-up clunkers. Harley-Davidsons. The whole glorious parade of humanity, milling around together.

What a change! What a miracle!

Then Fred noticed the sign.

It was an all-you-can-eat barbecue restaurant.

After a long silence, Fred said to Nettie: “You know, I think it’s a good thing that church became a barbecue restaurant, because if it were still a church, most of these people wouldn’t be allowed in.”

And Fred and Nettie marveled at all those people filling the place — Parthians and Medes, Elamites and Mesopotamians…

Welcome to Pentecost Sunday. Happy birthday, Church!

What’s the difference between the followers of Jesus before Pentecost and after Pentecost?

Before: a small, scared group of people hiding in a locked upper room, hoping nobody would knock.

After: those same people, out in the streets, telling everyone within earshot about Jesus — and by the end of the day, about 3,000 people had been baptized.

That is a remarkable turnaround for a group that had been hiding behind a locked door that morning.

Jesus had told them this was coming: “When the Spirit comes, you will receive power to be my witnesses — in Jerusalem, in Judea, in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” An ever-expanding circle. Starting where you are. Ending everywhere.

Jesus calls us to an inside-out kind of faith. The Holy Spirit is the power that makes it happen.

Why do we need power to do this? Because left to our own devices, we tend to make faith — like most things — about ourselves.

This isn’t a character flaw. It’s just human nature. Erik Erikson, a pioneer in child development, observed that babies are born utterly self-centered. When they’re hungry, they let you know. When they’re wet, the whole household knows. The self is the universe, and the universe demands service.

We grow up. Sort of.

One Sunday I tried using the version of the Lord’s Prayer from the Gospel of Luke instead of the familiar one. An eighty-year-old woman cornered me afterward. “What have you done,” she said, with quiet fury, “to my Lord’s Prayer?”

Mine.

Thank God I hadn’t touched the hymns.

All our lives we wrestle with this gravitational pull toward the self. The Holy Spirit, in its simplest description, is the power God gives you to escape your own orbit.

Studies show that other-centered people are happier than self-centered ones. This surprises nobody who has actually tried both.

I think of Larry and Betsy, who go out to serve food to the hungry at the Knox Area Rescue Ministry — and they don’t just go once, as a spiritual experiment. They go again. And again. I ran into them at a restaurant one evening, just after they’d finished serving. They were laughing, talking over each other, full of life. Having just spent hours feeding strangers, they looked like the two happiest people in Knoxville.

As so many volunteers have said: “I think I get more out of it than they do.”

Of course. That’s the Gospel. When you give, you receive. When you lay down your life, you find it. When you reach outside yourself, something inside yourself gets healed.

Some time ago, a set of grandparents were concerned about their adult son and his family — consumed by career, success, accumulation. Too busy to slow down, much less look outward. But these grandparents had the Holy Spirit in them, and they had an idea.

They asked if they could take the grandkids — ages 12 and 14 — on a summer mission trip to Guatemala.

The parents shrugged. Sure, why not.

Amy and Michael came home different. They had met children who had no parents, no reliable food, sometimes no clean water. Back in their affluent suburb, they saved their allowances, did odd jobs, held small fundraisers — all to help dig a well at the orphanage.

When the parents saw this in their children, something shifted. The next summer, they went too. Sweating in the heat, digging, building, making friends with small orphaned kids whose names they were just learning to pronounce.

One night, the mother lay in her tent, swatting mosquitoes, surrounded by inconvenience and discomfort — and suddenly realized she had never been so happy in her life.

That’s not irony. That’s the Gospel.

I wish I could close by asking you to simply decide to move your faith from the inside to the outside. But that’s not quite how it works. We don’t have the horsepower to overcome our natural self-centeredness on our own. That’s why Jesus told his disciples to wait — to pray — until the Spirit came to them.

And then one day — this day — the Day of Pentecost — it did.

The doors flew open. The scared people became bold people. The locked room became a launching pad.

That same Spirit is still at work. In this church. In you.

So today, the invitation is simple: Pray. Ask the Holy Spirit to crack you open — just a little — and push you out into the world God is calling you to love.

And maybe, while you’re at it, invite someone to come along.

Amen.

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