Rob Tennant, Hillside Church, Chapel Hill, NC
Pentecost, Sunday, May 31, 2020
(COVID-19, steaming worship)
Shavuot is the commemoration of
Moses receiving the Torah, the law, on Mount Sinai. Some Christians will say they don’t like the
law. Some Christians ignore Jesus’
statement “I have come not to abolish the law but to fulfill it.” Jesus adored God’s law and knew it better
than anyone. He read the law, memorized
the law, and meditated on the law.
What
is this law? Read the first five books
of the Old Testament, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and
Deuteronomy. Creation. Establishment of Israel as God’s people. Slavery in Egypt and Exodus. And law.
Much of this law, we Christians don’t observe because we believe the
sacrificial worship system was fulfilled by Jesus. Still, the law is in the Bible we claim to
revere. We have to read it, respect it,
and understand it.
Shavuot;
Jewish people remember Moses receiving the law.
In
Acts 2, the followers of Jesus were where we left them last week in Acts 1, in
Jerusalem, waiting to see what God would do next. The day of Shavuot came, or in Greek, the
language of the New Testament, the day of Pentecost. God’s next move was to rain down fire – the
Holy Spirit, filling the hearts and minds of Jesus’ followers, empowering them
to spread God’s love as they bore witness to the death and resurrection of Jesus.
In
his Pentecost sermon, Peter tied the coming of the Spirit to the vision of the
prophet Joel. “In the last days, … God
declares, … I will pour out my Spirit” (Acts 2:17; Joel 2:28). Christians today rightly associate Pentecost
with the coming of the Holy Spirit. We
don’t pay enough attention to the activity of the Spirit throughout God’s word. We circle this as the moment God empowered
his followers. It’s not the first time
God acted as Spirit. This event at
Shavuot, the Pentecost that came immediately after the resurrection, falls in
line with a tradition of God’s Spirit filling His people so they could achieve
his purposes.
Of
the 100’s of Old Testament stories in which we see the Spirit, consider Numbers
11. Moses has led Israel out of
Egypt. The nation camped out at the foot
of Mount Sinai while Moses received the law.
Then, the people moved across the Sinai Peninsula toward Canaan – the
Promised Land. In Numbers 11, on the
move, the people complained.
Griping,
groaning, grousing: it’s one of the original human activities. In Exodus chapter 2, enslaved in Egypt, the
Israelites groan. Verse 24 says “God
heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, and God
looked upon the Israelites, and God noticed them.” Heard. Remembered. Looked.
Noticed. Through Moses, God led
his people through the Red Sea, and into the wilderness, completely dependent
upon him. By the time we arrive at
Numbers 11, the people have complained a lot.
Now they are pining to go back to Egypt.
They
have forgotten how unbearable life was under the taskmaster’s whip. “We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt
for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic;
but now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to
look at” (Numbers 11:5-6). In the face
of wilderness challenges, they whine and complain and God isn’t having it.
This
part of the story should be very familiar for us, especially in today’s outrage
culture. Facebook and Twitter exist for
us to, unchecked, spew forth our self-righteousness. We are easily offended. From the busybody on the neighborhood list
serve to the school friend you haven’t seen in a decade to the past-his-prime
comedian to the White House; everyone can go on these platforms and try to
shame those they don’t like. Outrage
culture is polarizing our country. It is
dangerous and immediate. We are better and
quicker at complaining than we have ever been.
Moses
heard the people complaining. Because of
his special relationship with God, he knew their complaints angered God. I am certain God is none-to-happy with the
way we, in our culture talk about about one another. God was furious, the people wept, and Moses
was in the middle of it. So, he complained.
He barks at God, “Why have you treated [me] so badly? Why have I not found favor in your sight,
that you lay the burden of this people on me?
Did I give birth to them, that you should say to me, ‘Carry them in your
bosom, as a nurse carries a sucking child,’ to the land you promised on oath to
their ancestors? Where am I to get meat
to give all these people? For they come
weeping to me and say, ‘Give us meat to eat.’ I am not able to carry all these
people alone, for they are too heavy for me.
If this is the way you are going to treat me, put me to death at once”
(Numbers 11:11-15).
Oh,
Moses really tells God off. As your
pastor, I suggest you don’t talk to God the way Moses did. If you do, don’t expect God to react the same
way to you that he did to Moses. Look at
Eve, Noah, Abraham, Hagar, Jacob, Joseph, Joshua, Ruth, Samson, Job, David,
Elijah, Jeremiah, Esther, and Daniel, just to name a few. Each one has a dynamic relationship with God
as Spirit, but each is unique, different from the others. If you have put your trust in Jesus Christ,
you will develop your relationship with God the Spirit and maybe you’ll find a
moment where you want to complain as Moses did.
God relates to each individual individually. What we see with Moses is not a formula or a
pattern; it’s story. Your part in the
story will be unique to your relationship with God.
Moses
unloaded, gave God a piece of his mind.
It wasn’t the first time and wouldn’t be the last. In this instance, God says, OK. Gather seventy elders and I’ll give them
Spirit so it’s not all on you. He gives
exactly what Moses requested. Then he
tells Moses he’s going to give exactly what the people requested.
They
don’t like the Manna God had fed them.
He’ll give meat – quail meat. He’ll
give so much they’ll have quail coming out of their noses (Numbers 11:20). What
does Moses say? “I have 600,000 people
with me” (11:21). He can’t believe God
can do this. Moses has already seen a
burning bush, the 10 plagues that devastated Egypt, God traveling before him in
a fiery cloud, the parting of the Red Sea, water pour forth from rocks, the
Earth open up and swallow some of the people in an another instance of
complaining, and he has received the law, written by God on stone tablets. Will there ever come a moment when he doesn’t
question God? God has had enough! He responds, “Is the Lord’s power
limited? You shall whether [God’s] word
will come true” (11:23).
At
this point both God and Moses sound riled up.
Does God get riled up? The Holy
Spirit is God available to us, speaking to our hearts, opening our eyes, and
empowering us to work for God’s good in the world. After this back-and-forth, Moses gathers 70
elders to the tent of meeting and the Spirit of the Lord comes on them, as it did
in on Jesus’ followers at Pentecost in Acts 2.
With
the Spirit of the Lord on them, they prophesy.
This means they spoke God’s truth with clarity and conviction. For some reason, two of the appointed elders,
Eldad and Medad miss the meeting. Can you
imagine missing the one elder’s meeting where the Holy Spirit pours out on all
the elders in a Pentecost-kind of way?
But God’s spirit wasn’t confined to the tent. If they couldn’t make it, the Spirit would
come to them! They prophesied too. They went around the camp speaking God’s
truth.
“Whoa! Whoa!
Whoa!” cries Joshua. At this
point, he’s Moses’ number 1 assistant.
“Stop these clowns” he tells Moses.
Eldad and Medad prophesying outside the tent didn’t fit Joshua’s
paradigm. Throughout the narrative in
Numbers, Deuteronomy, and the book of Joshua, he very rarely runs afoul of
God’s will. But here, it is too much for
him. As we often do, Joshua wants God to
act, but not beyond what he can understand or control. Moses hits Joshua with a
truth bomb Christians today badly need!
“Are you jealous for me, Joshua” (11:29)? You think I want to be God’s only
prophet? “Would that all the Lord’s
people were prophets, and that the Lord would put His spirit on all of them!”
At
Pentecost, we don’t all become prophets, but we do all have the opportunity, in
Christ, to know God the Spirit. We can
commit to speaking God’s truth. We may
not all be prophets, but we can speak prophetically. Because God works with, in, and through
anyone. He worked through constantly
complaining cowardly Moses. He called
out an imperfect people who fell short often, and through them settled the
Promised Land. When he came to earth in
human flesh, Jesus, it was in a peasant family in a backwater town of an
occupied nation.
In
spite of the shortcomings we have as a people, hypersensitive complainers in an
instant, outrage culture, God will work though us, His church. God shook up the Roman empire working through
the ragtag band of disciples whose leader had been crucified, and the world was
changed. Now there are followers of
Jesus in every nation.
The
spread of the Gospel happened because God the Spirit worked through people and
nothing is impossible for God. Moses saw
God feed 600,000 people more meat than they could stomach. With five pieces of pita bread and two trout,
Jesus fed 5000 people until they were buffet-full. There were 12 baskets of leftovers.
No
limits apply to God. His Spirit pours
out in the tent and outside it. Will the
Coronavirus break us? Maybe, but if we,
as God’s church, work in concert with the Holy Spirit, we’ll see the wonders
God will do, even in a time such as this.
Will political divisiveness tear us apart? To a degree, yes, but even in the midst of
social turmoil, with the Spirit at work in us, we will see the wonders God
works, working through His church.
It
is Pentecost. Read the story: Numbers
11; Joel 2; Acts 2. Look at the world
around you, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
The Holy Spirit working in the church and through the lives of Jesus’
followers will continue drawing people to faith in Him. Watch and see. Is there anything God cannot do?
AMEN
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