Sometimes I just sit and marvel at how the
systems for transmitting information have changed in my lifetime. When I was in
high school, I remember my dad saying to me: “Cheri, one day, everyone will
have a home computer. And we will all have a phone that we will carry around in
our pockets and the number we have will just move with us when we move from
city to city and state to state.”
That was about 35 years ago and I could not
imagine such things and thought he was kind of crazy. But my father loved to
read about technology developments and so of course, he knew what was coming.
Compared to when I was growing up, things have changed so much. Now we have the
ability to get personal messages out to groups of people in so many ways it
boggles my mind.
I can post a celebration about my kids on FB
and get 100 “likes” in a matter of a few hours. A famous person can do
something outrageous on Twitter or Youtube and get a million hits in no time.
Social media can be used for trivial things, but it can also be used for
something really important, to change peoples’ attitudes, or to get the word
out.
Take, for
example the girls in Nigeria. That incident should have gotten world-wide
attention from the moment it happened, but it did not. On April 14, 2014, 276 girls disappeared from a
school. These girls were leaders. They were trying to improve their lives as
they completed their education. They were taken by the Boko Haram in Nigeria,
an Islamist militant group. The group is
known to be opposed to Western education and used violence on several
occasions. (Source: (“The First Multi-Media Blowup Moment,” ON Scripture, Karyn Wiseman)
At first, you could not find a story anywhere
about this in the mainstream media. It
wasn’t on Television, Radio, in print media, etc. After about ten days, on
April 24th the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls was trending on Twitter.
In just a week it had been used over 1.5 million times. Eventually, it showed
up on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and just about every other social media
platform worldwide millions of times.
The mothers of the girls started the campaign using
signs at a rally in the capital of Nigeria. Many other people joined in across
the world. People like Michelle Obama,
posted photos of themselves with signs saying “Bring Back Our Girls.”
As my colleague Karyn Wiseman points out,
“Twitter and Facebook “blow up” almost daily about any number of topics –
politics most often.” (“The First Multi-Media Blowup Moment,” ON Scripture, Karyn Wiseman). “However,
the #bringbackourgirls campaign has sparked the international community to now
send troops into Nigeria and has launched additional campaigns to bring
attention to the issue of child slavery, kidnappings and abductions, and the
role of hate groups internationally….this situation unites just about everyone
behind one cause – freeing these girls” (ibid).
This “blow up” on social media is kind of like
what happened on the day we call Pentecost. Pentecost was a huge multisensory
event in which a message got out to a huge number of people. These days, we
have social media as a way to get a message out fast. In the year 30 AD, they
did not have such technology. They had something better. They had the Holy
Spirit. So here is what happened (Acts 2:1-21 from The Message paraphrase for
those following along on the web) .
The disciples and close friends of Jesus were
together in one room and the power of the Holy Spirit came upon them. Scripture says it was like wind and fire. It
was like nothing they had ever experienced before. Jesus has promised them when
he ascended into heaven that if they went to Jerusalem to wait, that the Spirit
would come to them and give them the power to carry out the mission in the
world. Here it was, THE DAY HAD COME!
Pentecost was a Jewish Festival that came fifty
days after Passover. Jews had traveled from all over the Mediterranean world to
come to Jerusalem to celebrate this Festival of Pentecost. So it was a
multicultural festival, a gathering of people from many countries who spoke
many languages. But suddenly, these disciples, from Galilee, not well educated
fishermen, found themselves speaking in the native languages of all these
people from all these other countries. It was a miracle.
People heard in their mother tongues, from people
who could not have known that language previously. But here is the thing, God
wanted the message to get out there. God wanted a “blow up”, an explosion of
knowledge, of information, of the message of God’s love.
The people said: “They’re speaking our
languages, describing God’s mighty works!”
You
see, God wanted everyone to get the message. So God created this huge event
with wind and fire and miraculous translation into many languages. And then
Peter preached and told the people to listen and he quoted from the prophet
Joel and reminded them that Joel has promised that there would come a time when
God would pour out God’s spirit and men and women would prophesy, that means
they would tell the truth, and whomever calls out for God would be saved.
When
we celebrate Pentecost every year we remember it as the day the church was
born. This is the day the message spread like a story that goes viral on
Twitter or Youtube. Sometimes it is a story of something beautiful or something
funny. Sometimes it is a story like the one of the girls in Nigeria. The world
needed to know that Boko Haram kidnapped
those girls. Someone needs to do something.
Our message is the message of God’s hope and God’s
love. Our friends and neighbors are facing many challenges in the world. Some
of our friends are in despair. They have not been close to God for a long time,
if ever. They gave up on church a long time ago for a variety of reasons. They
have problems of all sorts: money problems, relationship problems, health
problems. They are worried about crime, global warming, and our crumbling
infrastructure. Our friends and neighbors need hope.
So for us, on Pentecost, the question is this:
How can we make God’s message of hope “blow up” and rise above all the other
messages that people hear? Because there are a lot of messages out there. How can we make the message of God’s love like
a powerful wind and a fire that is never vanquished, how can we show people
that when we decide to line our lives up with God, we have hope in the face of
despair?
The message of hope that Jesus brings is more
than a FB status update that we post one morning, wondering if people will like
it. This hope drives us to be a force for change in the world.
The power of Pentecost living in us, means that
we live as a people of hope. And then we translate that hope into the languages
of people in all sorts of walks of life: East Siders, West Siders, blue collar,
white collar, college educated, those who never finished high school, Michigan
Fans and Ohio State Fans, Democrats, Republicans, Independents and people who
don’t vote because they have given up hope in our government.
We have one message: HOPE. Jesus had one message:
HOPE, hope that comes from putting our trust in God. The churches that those
first disciples planted spread like wild fire because they had hope. They did
not give into despair no matter what sort of personal or communal challenges
they faced. They put their trust in God, and that made all the difference.
We can have a Pentecost moment here too. It can be more powerful that any “blow up” on
Youtube, Twitter, or Facebook. When we put our trust in God, HOPE starts
showing up where despair once lived. Every had one of those moments of
despair? I have had them. But Hope is powerful force, like wind and
fire that fills a room and propels us to go out and change the world.
My friends, today is Pentecost. And the Spirit of
God lives in us. So let’s trust God. Let’s live as people of hope. Let’s go
into the world show them what it means to live with HOPE. Amen.
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