A S E R M O N FR O M S T . M A R K’ S E P I S C O P A L C HU R C H
N E W C A N A A N, C ON N E C T I C U T
The Day of Pentecost ~ May 15, 2016
Based on Acts 2:5-12 and John 16:12-15
Good morning! I'm so pleased you're all here
on this Pentecostal Day! I don't know what
you can see here today, but I can see that the
Spirit is alive here at St. Mark's.
On this red day of the Spirit, we just heard the
Collect of the Day, which is to collect our
thoughtful prayers for the day. It is said that
on this day the Lord opened the way to
eternal life to every race and nation by the
promised gift of the Holy Spirit. We pray that
the Spirit might share this gift throughout the
world by the preaching of the Gospel. May it
reach to the ends of the earth.
This morning I thought we would take a look
at the work of the Spirit and how it has spread
to the ends of the earth. I want to begin with
what just happened, during that beautiful
chaotic moment in the reading of the Acts of
the Apostles, and then talk about where we
are in the world today. It was fun to see your
faces as people got up to speak in other
languages in the holy chaos of the moment.
Gathered as we are today, what we are doing
here is acting out the meaning of our lives in
the light of God. We are acting out what
happened long ago in Jerusalem, on that
particular day. Pentecost gets its name from
fifty, like pent and pentagon, and it is fifty days
after the Passover. The Pentecost in the
Hebraic tradition is something like we would
have as Thanksgiving. A Thanksgiving, a
prayerfulness for the fruits of the earth.
The Disciples were gathered in what has
become known as the “upper room.” Scholars
who read the scriptures would say that there
were 120 people in that space. They
experience a theophany, a manifestation of
God.
We all know this story, but it is worth
reiterating that a sound like the wind (which
was not the wind) was heard and it was clearly
a thunderous sound. It says there was a
manifestation that was like fire (but was not
fire) that separated into tongues. They were
tongues of fire. Those of you who are
Episcopalians or former Catholics or
Catholics know that the miter of the Bishop
signifies a tongue of fire alighting itself upon
the Bishop.
And the tongues alight. Alight—isn’t that a
great word? “The tongues alight upon those
gathered in the upper room and they began to
speak in tongues.” It was the Spirit speaking
through their tongues, and they pour out into
the street. At 9 o'clock in the morning! And it
was chaos. That's why we love having a little
bit of chaos here. It was chaos on the street.
And it said that there “devout Jews from all of
the surrounding lands.” So now we are in
Jerusalem, on the street where the upper
room is located, and these devout Jews who
have come from far and wide to live in
Jerusalem begin to hear these Galileans
speaking on the street. Now if you heard
Galileans in the Bible, you would be hearing
hicks. These people are hicks! They're from
the sticks! They're from way up North on the
Sea of Galilee. Suddenly, these hicks were
speaking different languages, and all the
devout Jews could understand them in their
own language.
At first they do not know what to do. They
said, "Ah, I know! These people are drunk!"
And this was when the first sermon was
preached. You get Peter, who stood up. I am
sure it wasn't a soapbox, but he stands up and
gave the first sermon. And the Acts of the
Apostles, the only true history in the New
Testament, unfolded. The history of the
church, beginning on that day, says that in the
end, 3,000 were converted. So in the
beginning of the Acts of the Apostles, Jesus
said you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and Judea
and Samaria and all the way to the ends of the earth.
So let's take a look at the ends of the earth.
This Pentecost event would be in the year 32
or 33, depending on which gospel you date it
from. Now let's leap forward to the year 1910.
I want to make a comparison between 1910
and 2010 so that you can be aware, as
Christians, how the Gospel has spread to the
ends of the earth. And the reason I choose
1910 is that that is the last time that the PEW
Research people did a study of worldwide
Christianity and the numbers in worldwide
Christianity.
Everybody ready? This is a numbers sermon.
For those of you who have an accounting
background, you are going to be happy. We
started with 120 folks in the Acts of the
Apostles. By 2010 there were 2.18 billion
Christians around the world. That is a third of
the population, which in 1910 was 6.9 billion.
During the 100 years between 1910 and 2010
the number of Christians quadrupled, from
600 million to 2.18 million. But during that
time, equally as shocking, the population was
also increasing at the same rate. So the
proportion of Christians in the world between
1910 and 2010 essentially remained the same:
about a third of the world’s population. We
can say, without a doubt, that Christianity is
geographically widespread. No one portion of
the world can claim to be the center of
Christianity, unless they are standing in the
Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem,
where Jesus was buried and raised. I would
say you have a pretty good claim about being
the center of Christianity there, but that is not
the numerical center of Christianity.
In 1910, there was a momentous shift. In
1910, 67 percent of Europe was Christian.
Guess what percentage of Europe is Christian
today? During that 100 year period, the
percentage of Christians who lived in Europe
decreased from 67% to 25%. In the United
States during that 100 year period, the
percentage of Christians living in the United
States went from 27% to 36%. So the
percentage of Christians in Europe decreased
and the percentage of Christians in the
Americas increased.
Now some of the momentous shift happened
in Sub-Saharan Africa. In other words, the
part of Africa that is below the Middle East.
There was enormous growth in that 100 year
period as part of the missionary movement,
and the percentage of Christians in SubSaharan Africa went from 9% to 63%. And in
Asia the number of Christians rose from 3%
to 7%. So in the global North, the percentage
of Christians in the world decreased and the
percentage of Christians in the global south
increased.
What I'm going to tell you next you do not
know. I'm going to tell you the top ten
countries by number of Christians. And I can
tell you, it's not what you think. Here it is:
1. The United States
2. Brazil
3. Mexico
4. Russia
5. The Philippines
6. Nigeria
7. China
8. Congo
9. Germany
10. Ethiopia
So what we can say today, that we could not
say a century ago, is that Christianity truly is a
global religion.
But there are some immense challenges. We
all know that Christianity began in the cradle,
right? The Hebraic cradle, where Jesus, a Jew,
walked from Galilee to Jerusalem. But we
know that today, the Middle East has the
lowest concentration of Christians in the
world. This is something that we have talked
about on and off here at St. Mark's. Those of
you who went on the pilgrimage to the Holy
Land last year became more and more in
touch with this. The percentage of native
Christians in the Holy Land is on a line that is
leading to zero.
Former presiding Bishop Frank Griswold and
Phoebe Griswold’s daughter is quite
something. She just wrote a book about the
possibility of there being no Christians in the
Holy Land. You may also remember that just
before Christmas, the pilgrims who went on
the pilgrimage gave a certain amount of
money to Christ Church in Nazareth, the
Episcopal Church in Nazareth, so that they
could expand their ministry. It's fair to say
that we as a group are committed to trying to
support native Christians in the Holy Land.
The largest number of Muslims in the world is
in Indonesia. Some of you know this. But I
can tell you that there are more Christians in
Indonesia than there are in the 20 countries of
the Middle East and North Africa region.
That's how few Christians are in the Middle
East. And here are a few other facts: Nigeria
has twice as many Protestants as Germany,
Germany being the cradle of Lutheranism, the
cradle of Protestantism. And that number
includes Anglicans. Brazil has twice as many
Catholics as Italy (and you wonder why we'd
have a South American Pope). The majority
of Christians live in countries that are a
majority Christian, and 10% of Christians live
in countries where they are minorities but as
you may know, the number of Christian
martyrs is soaring.
An organization keeps track of all this and for
years it was plotted at about 25,000 martyrs a
year. In the past years this number has started
to skyrocket. The curve is exponential. And
the number of Christians in the Middle East
that are pouring out of the Middle East comes
in great part from the instability that we know
that has its center in the Syrian mess. So
Christian Damascus, for instance, is all but
leveled, and all Christians in Syria are all but
gone.
There is, of course, diverse theology in the
Christian tent. It's a very big tent. Just to give
you some sense of it, 50% of Christians in the
world are Catholic, 37% of Christians in the
world are Protestant or Anglican, 12% are
Orthodox and 1% are other denominations
such as Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses.
Now what about the Pentecostal movement?
Again, if you are reading this you'll know that
the Pentecostal movement, which derives its
sensibilities from the day of Pentecost, is
expanding and growing in the world today.
4% of Christians in the world identify
themselves as Pentecostal.
On Wednesday, Dick DePatie and I were
visiting somebody who is homebound and in
Hospice care. We were leaving and walking
along the driveway and I was hunched over
with my hands in my pocket saying something
about prayer. And the man who was cleaning
the grounds said "Prayer! I'm a Pentecostal!"
And reached out and gave us all a kind of
communal hug. Beautiful! Pentecostals are
those who seek a conversion of religious
experience with what they call "the baptism of
the Holy Spirit," which is what is being
described in today’s lesson as the Spirit
coming upon the Pentecostals—the Apostles
and the Disciples in the upper room. They
may receive the gifts of prophecy, of healing,
of speaking in tongues, which is known as
glossolalia, or the interpretation of tongues.
What you may not know is that worldwide
Pentecostalism is a home-grown export of the
United States. Pentecostalism as we know it
essentially started in Los Angeles in the
holiness movement, right at the turn of the
twentieth century. And perhaps at Pentecost
next year I'll tell that story because it is an
amazing story. It burned like wildfire in that
area and spread throughout the world and
continues to grow today.
I want to say as I finish up here that we have
our own Pentecostal spirit among us. For
there is no doubt in my mind that not one of
you would be here today if the Spirit were
not alive in your life, inside of you. As Jesus
said in the Gospel that Martha just read to us,
the Spirit is alive and it is real. It is the only
reason that people come here at ten in the
morning on a Sunday and sit together and do
what we are doing. In a moment we are going
to baptize eight people in the power of the
Spirit. And we're also going to welcome fifty
or so new members to our communion
together.
Yesterday there was a great confirmation at
Christ Church in Greenwich, and a beautiful
funeral for Martha's husband, Kim. There are
people who have been visited at their bedside
while they lay dying this weekend. And over
and over and over and over in every one of
those places, that Spirit is there and that Spirit
is alive and for that we say thanks be to God.
Amen.