7:00am Holy Communion
Homily by Rev Timothy A Leitzke (Acts
2:1-21)
During my
freshman year of college my roommate and I would do our laundry on Saturday
mornings. The laundry room was always quiet and all of the machines open. One
morning we sat there reading for our classes when these two guys came in,
slowly, with big grins on their faces. Despite our being seated right in the
middle of the room they seemed unaware of us at first. They talked loudly to
each other. Presently they noticed us. One of them said to me, “Hey man! How
are ya?”
“Okay.”
“What are
you doing?”
The whole
not noticing two people thing had given me a poor opinion of their powers of
perception, so I wasn’t exactly surprised that the whirring, rattling, sloshing
washing machines did not register in their minds. I said, “I’m doing my
laundry.”
“Laundry?”
“Yeah.”
Why?”
“My clothes
are dirty.”
“What? Man,
you two should not be in here doing laundry. You two should be out going wild!”
And I
realized that St Peter was an idiot, because his whole speech in Acts was
founded upon his argument that the disciples could not be drunk because it was
only
Live for a
couple of hours and you’ll notice a lot of little events like this one, events
that contradict our expectations or that violate so-called “common sense”. We
make a sad mistake when we expect God—or our faith in God—to rid our lives of
the unexpected. Perhaps a better approach is to say, “God is with us, which is
a good thing because I don’t know what
is going to happen next!” We need the Holy Spirit to have faith when things
happen or change unexpectedly. We need the Holy Spirit to have faith, period.
St Peter’s
argument that the disciples weren’t drunk because it was only
I don’t know what is going to happen
next. I know that whatever it is we each have a friend and battle companion in
the Holy Spirit, who enables us to see, in each of life’s challenges, our
chance to be faithful, our chance to forgive, and our chance to heal.