One of the cardinal sins of preaching is retelling stories that you have used in other sermons.  However, I think it is a stupid rule of thumb considering how many of us like to re-watch our favorite movies, play our favorite songs over and over again, and retell the biblical stories year after year.  Besides this is my final sermon here at PUMC, so I hope you will give me a little latitude and humor me in the process.

There was a bible study going on at a church and the group leader asked, "What would you do if you knew you only had 4 weeks to live?  One man said, "For those 4 weeks, I would go out into my community and give everything I have to the poor and needy."  And the entire group agreed that would be a very great thing to do.  "For those 4 weeks, I would dedicate all of my remaining time to serving my family, my church, and my fellow man with a greater conviction," one lady said enthusiastically.  "That's wonderful!" the group leader commented.  Then one man piped up.  "For those 4 weeks, I would travel throughout the United States with my mother-in-law in a beat up old Ford Escort, and stay in a Motel 6 every night." Everyone was puzzled by this very unique answer.  "Why would you do that?" they asked.  "Because," the man smiled sarcastically, "it would be the longest 4 weeks of my entire life."

There’s another story about a woman and her parakeet, named Chippie. It seems that the woman was cleaning Chippie's birdcage with a canister vacuum cleaner, the kind with a long metal tube, on which you can put attachments at the end. Only to clean his cage, she took the attachments off.  She was cleaning the bottom of the birdcage when the phone rang. She reached over to get the phone, and as she did, she heard the unmistakable sound of Chippie being sucked up into the vacuum. Immediately she put down the phone and rushed over to the vacuum, pulled out the vacuum bag and ripped it opened. She found Chippie sitting there totally stunned, but still alive. Since the bird was now covered with soot and dirt, she grabbed him and ran into the bathroom, held him under the faucet and washed him in freezing cold water to get all the soot and dirt off. When she finished she saw the hair dryer sitting on the sink. She turned it on, and held Chippie up in front of the blast of hot air to dry him off.  A few weeks later someone at the newspaper had heard about the incident, so a reporter called to talk to the woman about it. He concluded the interview by asking her, "So, how's Chippie doing now?" The woman said, "Well Chippie doesn't sing much anymore. He just sort of sits and stares."

I share these two stories with you as models of how many of us approach life.  Either we are like the man with the Ford Escort and the Motel 6 and life is primarily about maximizing the amount of time one exists, in other words life becomes about quantity rather than quality. And others of us are like Chippie because after we experience suffering in our lives we forget how to sing and we merely just sit and stare and go through the motions.

Not only are these modern approaches to life, but I also sense that they were the prevalent attitudes overwhelming the disciples just prior to Pentecost.  They had abandoned Jesus on the night he was betrayed.  They didn’t even go to the crucifixion because they were afraid for their own lives. Then they hid out in the upper room for 50 days even after the resurrection.  The disciples feared the authorities might want to squash anyone who was even associated with Jesus.  In the gospel of John the disciples had gone back to home and taken up fishing again.  The desire for a long life or at least a safe life had won out over living a life of radical discipleship.  Imagine being one of those original twelve that followed Jesus, you would have been continually challenged to think and experience life in new ways; you would have given up the safety and security of your life to live with him for three years.  What would you do after he was killed for living across the boundaries, break down the walls, and challenge the status quo approach to life? Would you return home back to the safety of your former life?  I think they saw the opportunity to live life without risk and maximize the longevity of their existence and they could just go through the motions because hadn’t they been through enough pain and suffering already?

And that’s when Pentecost happens and Jesus calls the disciples out of the upper room, back from their lives of safety and security to take risk beyond measure and set the world on fire.  C.S. Lewis puts it this way:  The one thing God calls us to do is to love and if you love anything your heart will be wrung and possibly broken.  If you want to be sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal.  You need to wrap your love around hobbies and little luxuries, avoid all entanglements; and lock it up in a casket that is safe, dark, motionless, and airless.  Then it will not be broken; it will become impenetrable, unbreakable, irredeemable, because no one is safer than a dead person, and no one is deader than a person who is safe. No one is deader than a person who is safe.  You see folks, it seems as if the church has traded in Jesus of Nazareth for Jesus of Nashville, a nice unthreatening country bumpkin who brings with him a simple message of love and who in the worst form of the cliché, makes us feel good about ourselves.  No longer are we called to listen to the radical message of loving our enemies, or picking up our daily cross, but we are supposed to put forth a good image and not let anyone really know about our pain and suffering or the failures we have experienced.

But Pentecost is about responding to a God who does miraculous things with people who ask, but who am I? Or what do I have to give…I’m just one person?  It’s about a God who took 11 disciples and a small group of women and set the world on fire so that nearly 2,000 years later Christianity has become the largest religion in the world and that millions of people across the entire planet gather to worship every weekend.  The God who used uneducated fisherman, a tax collector, and some other nobodies from nowhere, to transform the world.  Just face it people you have something in common with all of the great leaders of the faith, you all have shortcomings.  That’s right the biblical greats are full of issues.  Moses was a murderer and slow of speech.  David was an adulterer and an accessory to murder.  Even Jesus broke the rules, crossed cultural boundaries, and broke the laws of his religion. So why can’t God use you to set the world on fire?  Is it because you aren’t good enough or is it because you desire a life of safety and security and you refuse to sing anymore?

Paganini was a world famous violinist who once appeared before a huge crowd during a concert. As he walked out on stage, he had the sense that something was wrong. And as he looked down he was horrified to discover that he had someone else’s violin and it was too late to go back and change.  And it was that very evening he gave the best concert of his life.  Later that night he said to some friends, “Today I learned the most important lesson of my career.  You see I thought all along that the music was in the violin, but tonight I learned that the music was in me.”

And so the message of Pentecost to all of us and especially to the people who are being confirmed this weekend is that we need to quit hiding behind closed doors…we need to quit living behind illusions of safety and security…and we need to quit reducing life to being only about quantity of years instead the quality of love we have given.

I’ll leave you with the closing story from the first sermon I ever preached here:
It’s about a 10-year-old boy who was taking piano lessons.  He didn't practice at all and his mother felt as if she was throwing her money away.  His mother really wanted him to stick with the piano, but she could not find any way to keep him motivated.  Just as she was about to give up on the idea altogether, she saw an advertisement about an upcoming concert of a renowned concert pianist.  It was a black tie affair at a huge performance hall.  There were supposed to be about 4,000 people in attendance and the mother was hoping that this concert would be the trick.  She thought maybe, just maybe, that her son would see his potential and be inspired by the great performance.  Well it was a black tie affair and a ten-year-old boy … not a good combination.  By the time they arrived at the concert hall the boy had already loosened his tie, and untucked his shirt.  While they were getting ready for the concert to start the boy was driving his mother crazy.  He wiggled around while asking all kinds of questions.  The people seated near them were ready to strangle the kid.  The young boy got up to go get a drink of water so everybody in the row had to get up to let him out.  Then when he came back they all had to get up again.  Then because he drank so much water, he had to go to the bathroom so they all had to stand up.  Finally he returned and when the entire row sat back down his mother grabbed him by the shoulders and said, "You sit here!"  Behave and be quiet!!!!"  The woman had turned her head to watch the others as they were finding their seats and the boy slipped away and began to run down the aisle.  He proceeded down toward the front of the concert hall and he ran up on stage.  Then to the shock of all the pious upper class citizens in the concert hall, the boy began to bang away at the piano playing "Chopsticks."  The crowd was outraged at this boy's behavior and started to question, "Whose boy is this?"   "What kind of parent would let their son do this?"  The mother who was thoroughly embarrassed was trying not to be noticed and she said "Ya whose boy is this?"  The crowd was in an uproar and the ushers were about to grab the boy when the piano performer came out on stage to see what all of the commotion was about.  And a hush fell over the crowd.  Everyone was interested in how this performer would respond to the situation.  The ushers stepped aside as the performer walked toward the piano.  As he kneeled behind the boy he gently whispered in his ear, "You're doing great kid, but whatever you do don't stop playing."  The great pianist then slowly reached his arms around the boy and began to mimic what the boy was doing.  He added harmony and created a musical masterpiece around the simple melody the boy was playing all the time whispering in his ear, "You're doing great kid, just don't stop playing."

We are all like that little boy, and it is God who kneels behind us and embraces us as we plunk away at this thing we call life.

And I thank you for doing the same for me…for gently embracing my family and me and for whispering words of encouragement into my ears…and for adding the harmony to melody of our lives.