In Praise of Pentecostalism
The Rev. Matthew Johnson-Doyle
Sunday, May 23, 2010

Reading: Acts 2:1-18

Message: In Praise of Pentecostalism

Note: The sermon is an oral event. This manuscript may not reflect the exact spoken words. If you want to hear what was actually said, you can listen to sermon visit our website at www.uurockford.org. © Matthew Johnson-Doyle, 2010.

It’s a small bungalow in Los Angeles,
April 1906.
There is a small group of folks sitting in the living room.
Unusually for the time, even in L.A.
some of the folks there are white
and some are black.
One of the folks starts to preach,
he speaks with a Texas accent,
and he has only one eye –
this man, William Seymour,
had contracted smallpox years before,
and had lost one of his eyes,
and his face was covered in scars,
but you could hardly tell,
because he wore a big beard to hide them.
Seymour had been born five years after the civil war had ended–
his parents were former slaves,
his father, in fact,
had responded to the offer of freedom in the emancipation proclamation
by taking up arms for the union,
and Seymour had some of that yes-i-can spirit.

Seymour had worked odd jobs here and there,
but been converted to Christianity and joined one of the growing
holiness movements in the late 19th century –
the Church of God, Anderson Indiana.
The holiness movement is the outgrowth
of the Methodist and Baptist revivals –
the idea was simple:
you could become holy
if you confessed your sins and committed yourself to Jesus.
It was personal, practical, and about feeling –
about the experience of being revived.

Well, William Seymour went for it.
He wanted it, he wanted that feeling of sanctification,
that feeling of forgiveness and restoration with God.

And he started to preach, here and there.
This was a little tricky,
because Seymour hadn’t actually had that sanctification experience.
He’d been converted, but he hadn’t yet been saved.

He was thus not unlike the children of the puritans,
who could only be included in the “half-way covenant”
because they themselves had not experienced God
in the same way their parents did.

Some folks were uninterested in a preacher
who talked about the need for an experience of the holy spirit,
but hadn’t had it.
Who is he to show me the way, when he hasn’t been himself?

But a small group in Los Angeles invited Seymour to come and preach,
and so back to that bungalow on Bonnie Brae Street,
April 1906.

Seymour’s been preaching and praying pretty much every day for five weeks.
Three days ago,
the group started fasting –
they are determined to experience the holy spirit.

They have hope, because this has happened in other places –
they’ve heard about it,
and they longed in their hearts –

there was a revival in Texas, and one in Minnesota,
and of course, the big one,
two years ago – 1904 – in Wales.
100,000 people saved by the spirit,
so many souls moved to confession and redemption,
and so this little band in LA,
they are praying and preaching and fasting.
Come spirit come.

Seymour is preaching,
and the people – different ages, different races –
are praying with him,
and they are hungry –
hungry for change in their lives
even more then they are hungry for the food of the body –
and then Edward –
one of the folks there to worship –
Edward starts speaking in tongues.

This is what they hoped for –
it’s just like in the story of Pentecost from the book of Acts,
the one we heard this morning.

It was evidence of the spirit,
of the Holy Spirit,

The next day, the group gathered again,
and Seymour preached on that passage from Acts,
and he told the story of Edward and his being filled with the spirit,
and soon, six others were filled with the spirit too,
and started speaking in tongues.
And people started to hear what was going on,
and they started coming,
and, then, finally –
six days into the ten-day fast,
three days after Edward had done it,
William Seymour himself spoke in tongues.

And, boy, folks heard about it –
and they came.
Black, White, Latino –
women and men,
rich, poor,
all ages –
they came.

Some came because they shared the hunger,
they wanted to feel the spirit.
Some came because they were curious,
and interested, and weren’t sure yet.
Some came because they thought it was ridiculous
and wanted to point and laugh.
They came.
And they prayed and they shouted and they sang,
and they filled that little bungalow –
you could hardly move it was so full of people.
They crammed in the doors and the windows,
they stood on the lawn and the street,
and then the front porch moaned,
just like the worshipers above,
and it creaked,
and it fell down.

No one was hurt,
but they had to move.

So they found a place to rent –
a place on Azuza Street,
in a downtrodden part of LA back then,
a big old building,
wooden.
It had been a church once, but that was a long time ago,
and since then it had been a warehouse and a shop
and most recently, a stable.
And it smelled like a stable.
There was still hay on the floor.

They upturned buckets,
put wood planks between them,
and called them pews.

Seymour and his band loved it –
just as their savior had been born in a stable,
the city of Los Angeles would be reborn in a stable.

And they packed the place.
It was exciting.
People were falling down, speaking in tongues,
jumping and shouting and singing.
The spirit was happening.

Oh, some folks were fakin’
Seymour knew it was true,
but he decided that it was more important
to be wide than narrow,
more important to get the one that’s true
then to prevent the two that are just pretending.
And, you never know,
sometimes they fake it until they make it.
Seymour wasn’t going to kick anyone out,
after all, he had preached before he had had his own salvation experience,
so who was he to bar the door?

Word spread.
William Seymour’s old mentor, a famous white preacher named Charles Parham
came and was invited to preach –
but when Parham saw what was happening,
he was furious.
Black folks and brown folks and white folks
all sitting together –
Parham couldn’t believe it.
Women falling down in the spirit
in the same room as men.

Parham saw the fakers, too,
and he told Seymour that something had to be done –
and Parham’s invitation to preach was rescinded.
That wasn’t the church Seymour was building.

The new Pentecostal movement thus began to split.
Churches were started in other parts of town,
and then all over the world,
and folks got divided – a Spanish speaking one,
an Irish one,
a white one and a black one.

The Azuza Street Revival continued for years,
but by 1915, nine years after the front porch of the bungalow collapsed,
only a few remained,
all black.
Seymour died in 1922 – he was only 52,
his wife carried on for a while,
but the congregation lost the building in 1931
and the church faded away.

Today is Pentecost – fifty days since Easter,
that’s what Pentecost means, fifty.
it is said to be the day when the spirit spoke to Peter and the rest
all those years ago.

Can you imagine what it would have been like?
To be in that upper room?
To be in that bungalow?

I’m sure some of you know exactly what it was like,
and have experienced something like that yourself.

I myself have felt something a little like this –
in the woods in Washington State,
a summer’s night in 1999,
worshiping with Unitarian Universalists,
I felt something –
and I don’t know what to call it, but spirit seems a fine word –
and it was a feeling of connection,
with the people in the room and the stars in the skies,
and all that is,
a feeling of peace and embracing love.

And I suspect that was what it was like,
in the upper room,
in the bungalow.

A feeling of wow,
a feeling of power,
of feeling of love.

That feeling is pretty powerful.
Of course they hungered for it.
Of course they did.

That feeling is pretty powerful.
Of course it broke through the barriers –
the lines between races and colors,
between men and women,
between rich and poor.

After all –
“There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one.”

That feeling is pretty powerful.
Of course folks tried to control it,
use it for their own good.
Of course they did.
That seeking is pretty powerful.

Pentecostalism,
the religious movement that traces its birth back to that bungalow
in Los Angeles,
now numbers 500 million across the world –
it is particularly strong in Latin America and Africa,
but also throughout the United States.
Some Pentecostal churches have moved a little into the mainstream,
become a little more haughty-toity,
but mostly, these are places not unlike that old stable:
where folks who have been cast aside
or cast apart
gather as one, feel the power of love,
are reminded that every person is a child of God,
that the divisions of this world
are washed away in the power of the spirit.

Unitarian Universalism has a kind of complicated relationship
with revivals and thus with Pentecostalism in particular.
It was the first great awakening, in the 1700’s,
that caused the precursors to the Unitarians
to emphasize reason and respectability in religion.
They were disparaging to all that “enthusiasm.”
They very clearly did not want any enthusiasm in their religion.

Religion for them was about thoughts sublime,
it was about feeling, but an interior feeling of calm understanding.
That’s what they said,
but let’s be honest –
this was mostly about class prejudice.

Those Boston Brahmains – of proper English stock -
didn’t want to be like
the Welsh Methodists or the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians
or, worst of all, the Baptists.

The Universalists, on the other had,
were more amenable.
They were more working class, self-educated, themselves –
and they believed that God was love,
and that all people were restored unto that Love –
and many had been Baptists or Methodists
before they became Universalists –
in fact, the leader of the Universalists in America,
John Murray,
was a Welshman who had been a Methodist
before he was converted to the doctrine of Universal Salvation.

And so we inherit these two strains –
the one suspicious and hostile
the other interested and respectful.

Look –
it’s not a coincidence that the Unitarian Universalist congregations
which are the most racially, culturally, economically inclusive
are also the ones that embrace the idea
that the spirit of life, the holy spirit,
is active in the event of worship –
places where nobody gives you the evil eye
if you put your hands in the air
because you are feeling it,
or if you say Amen in worship,
places where the spirit does come down,
and people are honest about their hunger,
their hunger for the food of the soul.
If you find yourself in Tulsa or D.C. some Sunday morning,
go visit our churches there –
each of them appropriately is called All Souls,
and worship with them.

I’ve done it this year,
and it gave me hope –
hope that we could be places
where the spirit comes alive
and where all the souls of the world,
regardless of color, race, language, or class
are welcomed.

This isn’t just about doing something that is culturally familiar.
This is about recognizing
that we human beings are so good at dividing –
so good at classifying and judging,
so good at saying, “oh, that’s not me” –
that it takes something extraordinary to break down our divisions.

It didn’t take long
before the Azuza Street revival started breaking up
into different groups.

It didn’t take long
before the new Christian church
left that upper room
and became a religion of empire.

I guess you could learn from these histories
that unity is fleeting,
that our dreams are foolish.

But that’s not the lesson I learn.
I think that unity and inclusion and love
are precious and worthy.
It’s hard, but it happens
it happens when we surrender ourselves
to a love greater than our own needs,
and it lasts only for so long
as we are guided by that feeling of embracing love.
And, if you don’t know how,
you just fake it until you make it –
and that’s OK too.

I love Unitarian Universalism,
and I have no plans to change my religion.
But there’s a reason that Pentecostalism
is growing fast –
it is often more racially integrated than other traditions,
and for young people who are growing up
in a multicultural world,
it is strange to go to a mono-cultural church.
And, more importantly, it feels good.
It feels powerful.
When so much of life feels like cheap plastic junk,
when the world seems so out of control,
it feels good to feel alive,
to feel connected to something so much bigger
than all the pettiness of the everyday world.

There is no intellectual barrier for us –
we profess to believe that all people are brothers and sisters,
we profess that what is holy and powerful
is part and parcel of the world,
that the spark of the divine lives in each person.

Plenty of folks who are attracted to the feeling power
of the Pentecostal movement
especially the younger folks –
would much prefer to worship with people
who were inclusive and welcoming
to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people,
as we Unitarian Universalists are.

Some of them would like to feel the power of the spirit
without having to believe in a traditional God,
or the sacrificial atonement,
or the apocalypse –
and we could be that place.

So I invite you.
If you are feeling the hunger for more soul,
feel that hunger here,
and be fed,
help make the meal for others.
If you seek multi-cultural community,
then give yourself over the spirit of unity and inclusion,
the celebration of beauty,
and be sustained in that spirit.
If you don’t know yet,
fake it until you make it.
There’s no judgment here,
all people are welcome.


At those Azuza Street meetings,
some folks sang and shouted,
and others sat in silence
and just let it all wash over them,
and that’s fine too –

the point is this:
you are holy and sacred,
and so is everybody else.
And sometimes you’ve got to let yourself feel it;
it can be scary.
Hell, it might change your life.
But that’s the whole idea.
Let it come,
take it where it goes,
stay at the table,
include, keep including,
reach out, keep reaching out,
each day,
be transformed,
be an agent of transformation in the world,
don’t give up,
even if you are frightened,
don’t give up,
love is stronger than fear,
love is stronger than fear,
love is stronger than fear.