Texts: Numbers 11:24-30; Acts 2:1-8; 14-18

Speaker: Joel Miller

There’s a story in the Torah, the book of Numbers, chapter 11.  The Israelites have just left Mt. Sinai.  Moses has communed with God and given them the Ten Commandments.  But he’s getting frustrated – with the people.  They’re complaining.  They’re hard to lead.  None of this was Moses’ idea anyways.  He’s overwhelmed.  Something has to change, and the Lord has an idea. 

Moses is instructed to a select group of elders – 70 of them.  Yahweh says, “I will take some of the spirit that is on you and put it on them; and they shall bear the burden of the people along with you so that you will not bear it all by yourself.”  Moses is skeptical, but also kind of desperate.  He goes with it.  He calls these elders together.  He takes them outside the encampment and has them circle up around the tent of meeting, which was the place Moses would go to meet with the Lord.  Kind of a mobile mini temple.  A temple for nomads.  They circle up around this tent of meeting, and sure enough, Yahweh comes down in a cloud and takes some of the spirit that was on or in Moses and distributes it to the 70 elders.   The spirit rests on them, comes alive within them.  They begin prophesying.  They are spirit possessed, in a good way.      

There is a bit of a hitch.  Someone forgot to do a head count.  Two of the 70 either hadn’t checked their messages or were lagging behind.  They’re still back in the camp, with the people, not gathered at that special tent of meeting with Moses, the others, and the Lord.  But when the spirit rests on all the elders out there, it still comes on those two in the camp.  They also prophesy. 

A young man in the camp sees this and runs out to tell Moses.  One of the elders, Joshua, son of Nun, hears the news first and tells Moses to make those two men stop.  To which Moses replies: “Are you jealous for my sake?  Would that all Yahweh’s people were prophets, and that Yahweh would put the spirit on them.”

There are a couple important things going on in this story.  One of them, which we knew about, is that the special spirit of wisdom and leadership that Moses possessed, or that possessed Moses, is being spread around to a wider group.  Rather than Moses being the singular leader, we have the beginnings of a leadership group, a council of elders, a step toward the democratization of the spirit.  This is a new development.  It’s one of Yahweh’s better ideas. 

This is not what’s bothering Joshua. 

What bothers Joshua is that two of these elders had not been in the right place when this happened, and yet it still happened to them.  They had not been at the holy, sacred, set apart location where gods and humans meet.  They had been in the camp.  The camp is where the common things happens with the common articles of life — the cooking and eating; sleeping, sex, and sitting around; crying babies, arguments, everyday conversation.  That’s what happens in the encampment.  It is not a place for manifesting the spirit of God. 

There is a boundary violation going on between the holy and the common, and it messes with Joshua’s sense of proper order.  He doesn’t want Moses to put an end to what’s happening at the tent of meeting with the 68 elders.  That’s where that kind of thing is supposed to happen.  He wants Moses to shut down those two others who have no right prophesying away from that sacred circle around the tent of meeting.  But Moses doesn’t shut it down.   

This is one of the assigned lectionary readings for today, Pentecost Sunday.  What we celebrate today has everything to do with the Holy, and how that relates with community, and all of creation. 

If we’re honest with ourselves, we each have places that are more holy than others, or at least places where it’s easier to experience the holy.  For example, it’s easier for me to feel close to God on the Olentangy Trail than at Easton Town Center, as anyone in my family can attest.  There’s a reason our youth look forward to Camp Friedenswald every summer.  I look forward to going to Friedenswald twice a year for Conference board meetings.  There are places – naturally beautiful places, carefully cultivated places, places designed for retreat and set-apartness, sometimes within our own homes – places where our spirits more readily commune with the Great Spirit.  The tent of meeting is pitched in different places of our lives, and thank goodness for that.  Hey, you may even wake up earlier than you’d prefer on a Sunday morning and come inside a church building.  Hopefully part of what happens here is a renewal of the holy in our lives.   

And, Pentecost is a not-so-gentle reminder that the holy doesn’t stop at the boundaries of our own making.  Or the ones that feel most comfortable and familiar and beautiful.  In Acts 2, a group of folks who had known Jesus in his lifetime, now wondering what is next, are gathered in one place.  They experience the sound of violent wind, as the text puts it, and fire, a presence among them which they decide is best named not just spirit, but Holy Spirit.  Each of them has something like a tongue of fire “resting on them,” and they begin speaking in different languages.  These are real languages and because this is a festival day in Jerusalem Jews from all over the world are there on pilgrimage, and they each hear these wonderful things being expressed in their own native language. 

And so the story of the church begins, there at Pentecost.  The Holy is not contained within one particular people or one particular language.  It is native to all people, and all languages.  The holy is native to all places.  The holy is native to you.  We are natural habitats for the holy.          

There is this movement in scripture from holiness as that which is set apart and separated, to holiness as that which overcomes and breaks down that very separation.  From boundary making to boundary breaking.  From outside the camp, to all throughout the encampment, and everyone and everything that happens there.  This is the gift of Pentecost.  It’s the spirit the church is called to embody.  The Holy Spirit.  Holiness becomes not so much about taboos and forbidden practices as it is about entering into loving relationship with the brokenness of the world, recognizing one’s own brokenness, encountering the Holy in the very space once deemed unholy.  I suppose that means I may even one day return to Easton and encounter truth, beauty, and goodness somewhere in there.    

But I have a concern.  I’m concerned about Joshua.  Joshua son of Nun.  He doesn’t get the response from Moses that he wants, about shutting down those temporary prophets who were out of bounds.  The folks who weren’t in the right tent.  I’m concerned where Joshua goes from here, and I’m concerned that Joshua’s mentality is still very much alive and well.

Before going there, there’s a verse back in Exodus that could shed more light on Joshua.  It’s in Exodus chapter 33 and it’s about this tent of meeting – how Moses would set it up outside the camp, how the pillar of cloud would hover there, a representation of God’s presence, how Moses would go there to speak to God, “as one speaks to a friend”, and then return to the camp.  That’s what Moses would do.  He would be in the encampment, then he would go away from the camp and be in this tent, talk to God, and then return to the camp and the people. 

To this, Exodus adds this verse which I hadn’t thought much of until this week, verse 11: “but his young assistant, Joshua son of Nun, would not leave the tent.” That is, the tent of meeting, out there away from the camp.  Joshua wouldn’t leave it.  Now maybe that was Joshua’s assignment, to stay out there with the tent.  Or maybe he chose to stay out there.  Either way, in his separation from the ordinary, within a place deemed holy, he seems to have developed a strong sense of separateness, a strong division between the holy and the unholy, where God is and where God isn’t.

And it’s not a big leap from young assistant Joshua living within that divide, forming a whole worldview out there in that set apart tent, to the war general Joshua, the new leader after Moses’ death, dividing the world into the holy people of God, his people, and everyone else, the Canaanites, the foreigners who had to be destroyed in God’s name.  There is a whole book of the Bible that bears Joshua’s name.  It tells the stories of these righteous military campaigns.  When you divide the world sharply into the holy and unholy – people and places – and you follow that to its extreme, you get violence.

It’s too much to put all that on one person.  Making Joshua out to be nothing more than an unholy warrior undermines the idea that the holy is native to all people, even Joshua.  And it’s too much to put all that on one tradition, or to identify that with an entire tradition.  Every tradition, every culture, every meaning-making structure, can go the direction of dividing the world into the holy and the unholy and following that course to its violent extreme.  This is not all on Joshua.  But there is a pattern here.  Even though Joshua is long gone, the spirit of dividing the world this way lives on.

Which brings us back to Pentecost and Acts chapter 2.  The way we choose to read this story, the origin story of the church, is that when the Holy Spirit shows up, or, rather, when people become attuned to the Holy Spirit that had been there all along, it seriously messes with prior categories of the holy and unholy.  And, initially at least, it’s not those people out there who need to change and become like us, joining our group, speaking our language, but it’s we who are changed to learn new languages and cross boundaries.  That’s what happens at that first Pentecost.  Rather than the Holy Spirit making everyone the same, there is a multi-cultural, multi-lingual extravaganza.  Young and old, enslaved, free, male and female.  It’s a really big tent.  It’s lots of little tents.  It’s a mobile temple for nomads, and no person, no creature, no geography, no nation, is out of bounds.

Every tradition, every culture, every meaning-making structure, can also go this direction, seeing the Divine outside itself, and thus expand and transcend itself.

When I look at this congregation, I see you all translating the life of the spirit into all kinds of settings.  I see you speaking the language of medicine and business and education and therapy, social services, parenting, tech, the arts, design, caretaking, farming and gardening, mentoring, writing, community building. 

May we experience that of God within ourselves.  May we increasingly see the holy in others, human, animal, vegetable, mineral.  And may we join with the spirit of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, in learning many languages.  Through this, may the impossible burden of violence decrease.  May every tent be a tent of meeting.