Whenever you read from the New Testament, you need to pay attention to what I call “the silent witnesses” of the Old Testament in the form of Hebrew voices clamoring for attention. Most stories in the Christian Scriptures need to be heard and understood by what we learn from the Hebrew Scriptures. Why? Jesus must be understood not as the creator of a new religion, but as the Jewish peasant teacher who lived and taught within the context of his Jewish faith. Early Christianity was branded by Jewish belief and as it grew and matured, it stretched out beyond the confines of that faith until it morphed into its own distinctiveness. So, Christian scripture walks hand in hand with Jewish stories and teachings, each illuminating the other.

One of those voices was heard from Mt. Sinai where Moses was called to meet the God whose name was simply, “I am who I am.” The clarity of the moment was amplified by the appearance of God’s presence. It was a formative encounter that shaped them and gave them an identity and a mission, all characteristics true of Pentecost. In fact, the feast of the Pentecost originated from Jewish roots in the festival known as the Feast of Weeks that commemorated and celebrated the giving of the law at Sinai. That explains why there was such a large crowd in Jerusalem.

The second voice clamoring to be heard out of Jewish faith comes from Ezekiel … remember the valley of the dry bones? God’s Spirit came upon Ezekiel, who ministered in Israel in the time of the captivity and God led him far out of town to a valley where countless dry bones were scattered. We understand the bones to symbolize the desolation of Israel who were senselessly killed as others were deported from their land.

A government that doesn’t want us to see the realities of war prefers we have a more heroic understanding of war typically closely controls modern photographic images of war. But on occasion we the images of countless bodies that have been stripped of clothes, stripped of their identities as men and women, and that become just a pile of bodies. They’re the victims of war and must be buried away from our view or we’ll lose our heart to wage war. Somehow we tolerate that from those who control the efforts of war. “Out of sight, out of mind,” we reason.

The bones in Ezekiel’s vision were Israel’s victims slaughtered by the conquering armies in order to exercise domination over the vanquished. This was the carnage of war and witnesses of the people’s suffering in exile. When the Lord asked Ezekiel, “Can these bones live?” the prophet replied, “You are the one who knows.” Then the Lord called out, “Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they might live.”

At the heart of this story swirls a world of images that interact with the meaning of Pentecost at a deep level. There are the fantastic signs of God’s invasion of life. There’s the wind and the sound of the wind, the upsetting of the normal order of things, the imagery of the flames sitting absurdly on the heads of everyone in the room, the power and energy overflowing out of the room showering upon the crowds of people below – all innocent to what was happening above them. The racket created by the 120 followers of Jesus gathered in that upper room became such a noise that they were like “a room full of bagpipes all going at once.”  The story also reminds us that God did not create witnesses ex nihilo (out of nothing), but rather took that which was deflated and scared and breathed new life into it. If we accept that all this energy released at Pentecost is about the invisibility of the Spirit who is wind, who is breath, then a whole new world emerges in meaning. Let’s play with that imagery …

In our lifetimes a totally modern point of view has emerged in that for the first time in human history, we can see the world in its totality as a sphere, a planet spinning in space as it circles our sun, an insignificant part of an immense system of stars and galaxies that extend so far beyond our comprehension it makes our brains buzz. The images of the earth from the surface of the moon are breath-taking in that the earth is the blue-green planet whose colors jump in comparison to the silvery-gray tones of the moon’s dull surface. From space, one can see the glow of the veil of the protective atmosphere that separates the surface of the earth from the vacuum of space.

In the atmosphere is all the air ever created for this planet. All the air that ever was cushions the earth from the rays of the sun and protects us from the harsh emptiness of space. When we breathe, every breath we take has been in the world since the creation. There is nothing new about it, just the same renewable air being shared throughout the eons of time of the earth’s existence over the last 4.5 billion years.

Playfully, Barbara Brown Taylor reminds us, “The same ancient air just keeps recirculating, which means that every time any of us breathes we breath star dust left over from the creation of the earth. We breathe brontosaurus breath and pterodactyl breath. We breathe air that has circulated through the rain forests of Kenya and air that has turned yellow with sulphur over Mexico City. We breathe the same air that Plato breathed, and Mozart and Michelangelo, not to mention Hitler and Lizzie Borden. Every time we breathe, we take in what was once some baby’s first breath, or some dying person’s last.”

Recognize in the imagery of the air, ancient and renewed with every generation, and the universal nature of it. All of us are renewed and sustained by God’s gift of oxygen. None of us owns it or controls it. It is invisible and takes no notice of who uses it, as it is God’s gift to all of us. Likewise, in the church we don’t own the air we breathe any more than we own the good news of God’s love and acceptance of us. There’s no exceptionalism at work here, whether we’re talking about the air or God’s grace, as all God’s creatures are welcomed to it and blessed by it.

So we might ask, when Jesus took his last breath, what happened? Probably the same thing that has happened every time someone has died. The gospel writers are emphatic about what happened on the cross in the mid-afternoon in which he was crucified. “It is finished,” he said, and in the King James Version of the Bible it says, “and he bowed his head and gave up his ghost” (John 19:30, KJV). The ghost referred to by John was not a spook, but the word in the Greek, pneuma, usually translated as, “spirit.”

See how it all works together? Mighty wind, spirit, ghost, Holy Spirit, breath … the gospels tell us in his first post-resurrection appearance, “He breathed on them and said to them, ‘receive the Holy Spirit’” (John 20:22 NASB). Barbara Brown Taylor toys with the imagery and suggests that Jesus’ last breath did not simply dissipate as so many last breaths do. Instead, she argues, it grew in strength, until it became a mighty wind, spinning and gaining in power like one of those modest storms that cross the Atlantic along hurricane alley until the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea turn them into a full blown hurricane capable of blowing off the roofs and destroying homes and disrupting the lives of everyone in its path. God doesn’t need to create out of nothingness to carry on because God has always taken old things and renewed them, re-invigorating them with the Spirit who puts new flesh on bleached bones bringing them back to life. The wind that blew back then blows today and when that which is dead comes back to life, witnesses rise up to tell their story. What was blown back to life in the upper room is the church and we are a part of that great story.

This spring marked the 103rd anniversary of the birth of the Pentecostal movement in America. It began April 9, 1906, in the house of a janitor named Edward Lee. A black Pentecostal preacher named William Seymour anointed him with oil (in biblical fashion) and the Spirit came upon him. Lee broke forth in ecstatic speech and said, quoting from our Scripture passage on the Day of Pentecost:  “This is that!” That night Seymour began preaching and a revival broke free in a movement now called the Azusa Street Revival. Within days the crowds began to build and the people came. So many came they moved to a bigger building. Once a day couldn’t sustain them so they met three times a day. There were as many as 800 in the room with hundreds more outside peering into the windows, all of them trying to get as close to the action as they could. The revival went on for three years and people came from every race and class. All the nationalities were there and social groups high and low were involved. Gender lines were not recognized and women and men alike were called to preach and minister.

You see, when the Spirit breaks free of our boundaries and our superficial isms, the Spirit can move freely like the wind and blow where it wishes bestowing power – enough power to put flesh on a pile of dry bones. Do you believe that?

One of the best known poems to be written in memory of one who died on the fields of battle was written in 1915 as soldiers in untold numbers were slaughtered in Europe. Canadian surgeon John McCrae was no stranger to the carnage of war, but he was shook by witnessing the death of friend and former student, Lt. Alexis Helmer. After seventeen days of continuous battle involving Canadian, French, British, Indian and German troops, McCrae reached the breaking point when Helmer was killed. With no chaplain present, the battle weary doctor buried Helmer just outside the tent where he conducted surgery trying to save the lives of the wounded. Venting his anger at the futility of war, McCrae sat down and penned these words …

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Dr. McCrae sat down and in twenty minutes penned lines that gave voice to the emptiness he was felt as he sat across the road from a cemetery where the poppies had blossomed in the ditches adjacent to the graves. He handed his fifteen lines to a young officer who was moved by what he read. “The poem was an exact description of the scene in front of us both. He used the word ‘blow’ in that line because the poppies actually were being blown that morning by a gentle east wind. It never occurred to me at that time that it would ever be published. It seemed to me just an exact description of the scene.” McCrae tried to throw the poem away, but later retrieved the scrap of paper and it became a fitting tribute to the cost of war.

Not much has changed. We’re still trapped in the sands of the Middle East and lives are still in jeopardy as we chase the ghosts of al Qaeda in the impenetrable mountain ranges of Afghanistan and the hostile villages of Pakistan. Eighty million dollars has been proposed to shut down the prisons of Guantánamo although where those prisoners will go is uncertain. Former Vice-President Cheney relentlessly carries on in his ideological war with the new President over the moral nature of torture.

On this Memorial Day Weekend, perhaps the poppies will blow again if only in our hearts. Maybe in their gentle swaying to the invisible whispers of the wind, we can find the resolve to listen to our hearts and hunger for peace.

Christian Scriptures (most of us simply call them “the New Testament”) essentially contain two large, epic stories. Both stories are grand, sweeping stories that take multiple books and several writers to tell.

By the way, I love what Karl Barth once wrote about the story of Jesus described by the ancient writers of the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament). While Jesus is not specifically described there per se, Barth claimed all the Old Testament writers were in essence like a crowd of people standing on a street corner all pointing heavenward and all speaking excitedly about that which they were pointing. Barth felt the Hebrew storytellers were prophetically describing One who was yet to come, and the reader of those stories could see the street corner from one of the upper floor windows of the building they were in but couldn’t see where the crowd was pointing because of the position of the building; likewise, neither could the reader hear all the crowd was saying. But it was obvious, he concluded, Jesus was the one they were pointing to and speaking about. So we can glean much from reading these two epic stories from the New Testament and hear from the multitude of writers a larger story that takes in our own stories and helps us meet God as God wants to meet us.

First there’s the story of Jesus of Nazareth, the Jewish carpenter’s son whose story is told in four familiar forms with four different points of view through four different storytellers. We call those writings, the gospels. Each of them echoes the others but they point their stories toward different audiences with the story of Jesus being told for certain audiences. I like how they resonate but still have distinctive voices. Sometimes it can be confusing, but mostly it’s a nice variety of reverberating stories that create a composite picture of what “God-with-skin-on” meant by joining us in the human story. Interesting is how each gospel tells the story on its own and doesn’t depend on repeating everything every other gospel has - some stories are in one, two, or three of the gospels but there’s very little all four gospels include. Seems we need all four to round out any one of them.

They tell of an obscure boy born in poverty in Bethlehem (what we would consider an answer to the question, “where are you from?”) as Joseph and Mary had traveled back to participate in a Roman census. The gospels clearly portray Jesus as the child at the center of a prophetic vision. The gospels give us a few stories from his first year or two but almost nothing beyond that until the inauguration of his time of teaching. It’s not until we get to the telling of his cousin John’s story (who was the opening act for Jesus as an adult) that he is finally introduced and explained.

From that point on there is an intensity about the telling of his three-year teaching life. Only then do we understand he came to preach about the Kingdom of God, his catch-phrase that points us toward a commitment to God that supercedes allegiances to any other lesser commitments. Jesus adopted Isaiah’s image of one who would come to “bring good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives, recover sight for the blind, set the prisoners free and to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor.” So purposeful was he about these things he disturbed the power systems of his time by unmasking them and ultimately those power systems conspired to execute him. The story of Jesus formed the basis for the first epic story of Christian Scripture.

The second great epic in the 27 books of Christian Scripture is the story of what happened to his followers after Jesus was killed by Roman order, buried, and three days later resurrected from the grave appearing alive on Easter morning. These next two Sundays focus on those strange days following the resurrection that lead us to that which was described on Pentecost.

The epic of the church takes off at the point of the story just as Jesus’ story was wrapped. What we learn in the coming of the Spirit was the unleashing of God in yet another form as the power of resurrection was internalized into the disciples who received an awesome sense of power when the Spirit of God was given to them on Pentecost.

Throughout the letters of Paul and the handful of other writings, we look upon the story of the disciples (known now as ‘apostles’) and the other first-century followers of Jesus as they endured incredible persecution for their faith and yet we marvel at how committed they were in telling others about this Jesus. At first they became known as “followers of the Way,” but later they took on the name of their teacher as “Christians.”

We stand this month in these in-between days as we finish the fifty-day period of time between Easter and Pentecost. It’s a time wide with mercy and goodness. It implies that we too, can be faithful followers of the Way, all the while recognizing we stand in this great tradition that is traced faithfully back to the first-century. We can peel back the church, layer by layer, generation by generation, and see our story being told by this great epic of the church.

When Birdie entered the church office, she said loud enough for everyone to hear, “Where’s that pastor of ours who’s spent his meager salary on an extravagant vacation that most of us can only imagine?”

Birdie knew many of our church members had vacationed in Hawai’i. Many had cruised the islands on one of those monstrous cruise ships while others had flown directly to Maui or Kauai to play golf or lay out on the beaches until their skins turned toasty. But the idea of their pastor going where they’ve gone to play is a stretch of their imagination.

Most of our members know my wife’s mother was born and raised in Honolulu and since she can no longer travel to see us, it’s up to us to go see her if we’re to see her at all. It’s tough duty, but I love her enough to go see her as often as I can. I know our church members suspect I love my mother-in-law more than my own mother. I love them both, of course, and resent the implications of conditional love.

I stepped out into the office hallway where I answered back, “Aloha!” The thought that I might be saying either hello or goodbye or both was beyond both Birdie and me so neither one of us were hung on the distinction.

When she came to my office, she said sweetly, “I sure hope you and your wife had a good vacation. As far as Hawai’i is from the mainland, I hope you felt like you left town and were able to relax!”

“Birdie, I only called the office twice and held my emails down to a couple dozen. I would call that a real getaway!”

“So what was the highlight?”

“I loved it all! You know me well enough to know I love the beach time we get. We did all the usual things folks do in Hawai’i, but there’s something we always do when we go. My wife’s dad died five years ago, so we paid our respects to his grave. And every time we go there from the day he was buried till now I can’t help but think he’s buried in paradise.”

“Preacher, tell me about that.”

“He’s buried in the State Veteran’s Cemetery on the far side of the island along with thousands of other vets who served their country. I loved the military honors that were a part of Dad’s funeral. But this veteran’s cemetery is different than most in that it’s located in a land that’s strongly tribal and ancient. So when we go to see Dad where he’s been laid to rest, there are signs everywhere of the Hawai’ian people who visit their loved ones regularly leaving beautiful flowers on most graves, trinkets of their lost one’s life and on national holidays, they even picnic on their loved one’s graves. Somehow it’s a beautiful and loving tribute that puts us mainlanders to shame.”

“That sounds so lovely … I wish I could see it for myself.”

“But the strangest part of all that is that my long-lost uncle who had walked out on his family thirty years ago is buried only 15 spots from Dad. I remember my uncle only vaguely from my childhood and knew he slipped out on all his troubles and disappeared from all contact. My mother-in-law had tracked him down a few years earlier for my Dad by asking about him at the VA in Honolulu using his Social Security number and learned he was living in the American Samoan Islands and living with a Samoan family. Later, he moved with his adopted family to Honolulu and was living as an adopted member of their family. When he died, they made all the decisions about his burial as though he was actually one of their very own.”

My in-laws attended my uncle’s funeral and were generously welcomed into this openhearted Samoan family. The next time we visited was for my wife’s father’s funeral and it was then I was introduced to this lovely Samoan family. They extended love easily and without any other reason than I was their adopted uncle’s nephew they opened their hearts up to include my wife and me.

All of this raises an interesting question to my notion that Dad has been buried in paradise because just a few steps away lies my wayward uncle. If Dad is in paradise, where’s my uncle? How does God call balls and strikes in such convoluted cases like this? My father-in-law was a good man. He loved his family and was faithful to his duties to God, his family, his country, and to every other commitment he might have made.

But my uncle was another matter. Never did I feel anything special with him, partly because he was so seldom around and partly because I knew his troubles would keep him from including me in his life.

Nevertheless, here they both lay. Both veterans loved their country enough to serve in significant ways through troubled times. Both had lived long lives. Yet there’s an indescribable difference to the quality of how they’d lived. And somehow they both ended up laying in a field of brothers in a place that is the essence of what paradise surely must look like.

Maybe there’s a sunny beach and a gentle breeze to stir the palm trees where God’s love is open and welcoming to all us wayward and weary travelers.

At least I hope so.