By Reverend Laurie DeMott

And yet somewhere in this amorphous mass of 6.5 billion people is you. When you think about your own life, it's like picking up one grain of sand from the beach to examine it more closely. Suddenly the grain that went unnoticed before has a distinct configuration -- color, shape, individuality. Your life may be only one of 6.5 billion lives on this planet but it is a distinct life with a unique shape. While it is true that your life can be reduced to a numerical fraction -- you are 1/6.5 billionth of humanity -- your 1/6.5 billionth part is precious to you. And so it is no real surprise to us that the scriptures declare that God knows this 1/6.5 billionth of humanity that is you and also considers you very precious.

What does come as a surprise is that God not only knows you but God calls you -- you, this microscopic piece of the whole -- to change the world. God asks the piece of sand to move the beach. God asks the snowflake to shift the course of the blizzard. Jesus says, "God wants to establish a realm of peace and compassion and you are the one God calls to be part of the movement and change the world." Jesus' disciples, like grains of sand looking at an immovable beach, protest, "Jesus, how can we possibly do such a thing?" Jesus replies, "If you have enough faith, you can move mountains."

When you are 18, you probably believe that you can move mountains and change the world. Full of the stories of your schooling, you see history as a progression of outstanding individuals who changed the course of civilization: the story of humanity is the story of William the Conqueror, Columbus, Galileo, Madame Curie, Henry Ford, Susan B. Anthony, and Martin Luther King, Jr. These are the men and the women extolled in our history books and at age 18 there is no reason to assume that you cannot be one who will also stand out from the crowd and join that procession of civilization changing figures. But as your life unfolds and time begins to run out, you realize that you will probably never be a Jane Austin or a John Calvin or even a Millard Fillmore. God's call to be part of the world changing movement feels more unrealistic then it may have when we could still be anything we wanted to be when we grew up and with each decade of our lives, God's call to be part of the kingdom movement becomes more a call that has passed than a call for our future. "I am but a grain of sand on the beach," we say. "God, I've discovered that though I may like who I am and I may be precious in your sight, I know there's nothing extraordinary about who I am. This particular grain of sand is too ordinary, too old, too small, too weak to move that beach. My time for mountain moving has passed. I will try to obey your commandment to love my neighbor but you will have to find someone more extraordinary than I am if you want to change the world."

In the story of [Pentecost], God's spirit falls upon 12 people and those twelve people will become the founders, the shakers, and the movers in God's plan to establish the gospel in the world. We think of the 12 apostles as being in the same league with Stephen Hawkings, or Bill Gates, or Nolan Ryan – we think of them as fundamentally different from the average human being and therefore different from anything we could ever hope to be. But at the time of Pentecost, there was nothing about these men that hinted anything spectacular would come from them. Not only did they come from uninspiring backgrounds but they were themselves so uninspiring that later church writers can't even recall all of their names. All of the gospel writers agree on the main ones – Peter, Andrew, James, and John, maybe Philip and Bartholomew if you are a particularly good Bible Baseball player – but when you get into the bottom half of the list, memories got fuzzy and the first historians of the church disagree. The fact is that people weren’t always paying the closest attention to the 12 disciples because no one really expected anything great from any single one of them and to think of the entire Christian enterprise resting on their shoulders was as unbelievable and as frightening to the first Christians as it would be for us to give the village of Birdsall the right to choose all of our American Presidents from now on. I have nothing against Birdsall, and frankly, letting them pick the president might seem more appealing than the process we are currently enduring but to put such awesome responsibility with such global consequences into the hands of a tiny unknown group of people would be a dicey proposition at best.

And yet this is exactly what God chooses to do because God recognizes what we often fail to recognize – history is not really a progression of extraordinary figures. One sociologist complains that the humanities “have a bias toward idiosyncratic and even egocentric individuality.” The human story, however, really cannot be fully explained by telling only the stories of political geniuses and charismatic leaders. For leaders to have been effective they had to have had people to lead; it was the ordinary dedicated individuals who trudged steadily forward believing in a vision that they could often not see themselves, persisting in the face of overwhelming odds, and refusing to give up on compassion or goodness or justice, or hope simply because they knew that to give up on those ideals would make them less than who they were called to be. Who remembers all the names of the people who marched the streets calling for justice during the Civil Rights movement? Who remembers the names of those who fought to abolish slavery or those who spoke up for children working in sweat factories or those who demanded that people with mental illnesses be treated like human beings? Who remembers the names of all of Jesus’ disciples who were called by the Holy Spirit on that first day of Pentecost? No one remembers them all and yet they changed our world.

We are a small church in a small town in a sparsely populated part of Allegany County. Some people still remember fondly the days when this church was so large that it had two services on Sunday. Others may have their own memories of churches they grew up in that were bursting at the seams or managed budgets of half a million dollars. We listen to the Pentecost story and think that if the Holy Spirit were really moving in this congregation we would see its affects in the numbers of people crowding to get in or that the Union University Church would be as famous as the Washington Cathedral. But that is not what Pentecost is about. The Holy Spirit doesn’t work through the rich or the famous, the Holy Spirit doesn’t work through the brilliant and the beautiful, the Holy Spirit doesn’t choose the powerful and the mighty – the Holy Spirit works through you and me.

John Bryson Chane, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, says that the church in America has decreased in numbers over the past few decades but while others are wringing their hands at the statistical decline, Bishop Chane says, “I believe it is a move from sickness TO health. The greatest time of measured growth for institutional, denominational-based religion when growth was carefully measured was during the post World War II era. Conformity and church membership and belonging was at the center of community life. The institutional church of that period was "theologically light."... There were no shopping malls, no youth sports on Sundays and there was normally only one wage earner in a family and no "turn key" kids. People had more free time, and community life revolved around church life. Institutionalized religion mirrored a life style where "issues" were not really part of the theological discourse in church life.

“All that changed with the period beginning in the 1960's when the nation was confronted by the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, radical student movements, the Black Panther Party, the assasinations of the Kennedys, King, Malcolm X, the burning of American cities and the rise of the new counterculture movement. All of these events challenged the institutional church to address the core teachings of Jesus and how those teachings either moved the institutional church membership into engagement or forced it to retreat to the comfort of what it once was in the 1950's. ... Today membership may be smaller.....but in fact membership is more involved, engaged, and more theologically aware than ever before. What I believe is happening is the emergence of a "New Pentecost for the 21st Century" where the church as an institution is leaner, smaller and more involved in the issue of relating core theology to the lives of its membership...”

And Jesus said, "The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field, it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches." And then he told story after story of men and women who changed the world because they believed in the power of God’s spirit working through them: a woman leavening bread, a faithful servant, a widow giving her only pennies away, a good samaritan. Jesus’ characters have no names in his stories, but the Holy Spirit gave them names – Wally, Kim, Bob, Beverly, Dale, Sandy, Steve, Chuck, Sam, Eliza, Peter, Mary, Evelyn, and all of the people who make up this church and small churches like ours around the globe. We are the people who believe in a God who can create a new world out of the small miracles of dedicated lives, and because we believe, and because we are willing to work without recognition, God will be able to use us to move our world forward to a place “where peace can happen; where hunger can end; where healing can take place; where love can make a difference ... where a life that lives for something, that stands for something, that longs for something, that proclaims something, that betters something" can change the world.

The Holy Spirit is hovering over our heads right now because we are and will always be the New Pentecost.