I’m not sure where the time goes – but it’s the fiftieth day since Easter. Pentecost means 50 – and it began with the Jewish festival of booths, which came fifty days after Pentecost and celebrated the giving of the 10 Commandments to Moses.

Because of the unusually early date for Easter this year, we find that Pentecost and Mother’s day have arrived on the same day – a curious confluence of the liturgical and the secular calendars, and one that threatens the integrity of the preacher. How does one honor both – does one ignore Pentecost – the great festival day that celebrates the birth of the church? Or does one ignore the celebration of The Festival of the Christian Home, as the church has named this day?

And there is a further truth about Mother’s day that has to be acknowledged. It is a very special day for most of us. It’s a day when Dads get to celebrate and acknowledge the work that women do in nurturing children and making a home. It’s a day when Dads who nurture the children, and do much of the child care get to acknowledge the women who are their partners. It is a day when young children everywhere are making paper flowers, pictures or breakfast in bed for their moms, and grown up children are making dinner reservations or long distance phone calls.

It’s a day that preachers ignore at their own peril because so many people place such a high value on motherhood.

It’s also a day of great difficulty for many persons. For many mothers, this is one more day when they wait with that low level anxiety, because their child is in harm’s way somewhere in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or another conflicted part of the world. For some mothers, it is a day of unbearable grief; another reminder of a child lost to accident or illness, or violence, or the world. For some children, it is a day to remember a mother who could not be there for them as mothers are supposed to be – who was stolen away by the lure of other adventures or by mental or physical illness. For some children, it is a day to remember with gratitude a mother who adopted them and loved them and raised them and who is always and forever their mother – but also to remember that somewhere there is a woman who carried them in the womb and birthed them and remains unknown to them.

In short, it is easier to focus on Pentecost. But there is a kind of shared truth about these two days that are – today – the same day. And that is this: Neither what happened at Pentecost nor a celebration of the complex relationships of families ought to be confined to a single day.

When my children were young, I loved the whole breakfast in bed thing – but frankly, what mother wouldn’t have loved it more of the cereal dishes were rinsed and put in the dishwasher the other 364 ordinary days of the year?

What preacher wouldn’t love it if the energy of Pentecost weren’t present the other 52 Sundays of the year?

Let’s re-introduce ourselves to what has been going on that as brought us to Pentecost, and then think about two themes which might help us with the meaning both of being empowered by the spirit and living as family together.

We have moved through the days between Easter and Pentecost in the company of the Risen One, seeing how the mission that God began in Jesus Christ is transferred to the human community called “church.” We have, so to speak, been witnessing the gestation of the church, and today is the day when the story of its birth unfolds – set right in the middle of Jerusalem with the whole world watching.

At the birth of the church, there is some kind of confluence of the energies of the universe that causes the creation of new relationships.

Spirit, wind and breath share the same root words in both Hebrew and Greek…

Here, the weather and the spirit of God conspire to breathe into the gathered community a new word, a new life.

There is something incredibly sacred about breath. At the birth of a child, the first thing we wait for is the cry, because it indicates to us that the child had drawn breath for themselves. At the bed of our aged parents, we may find ourselves barely breathing as we wait while their breaths grow shallower, less frequent, and then – the moment comes when there is not another breath, and though their physical body is right there, we whisper reverently, “she’s gone.”

It is, as much as any other criteria- by the drawing of breath that we measure life.

Pentecost is a conspiracy of breath. The wind, the spirit of God and the very breath of the human community are drawn together to create new life. At Pentecost, everybody becomes family. The boundaries of the “faith family” so to speak have heretofore been marked by nationality, by ethnic identity, by adherence to certain traditions that ensured and defined righteous behavior, by disciplines to codes of conduct.

This is a new kind of family. In a conspiracy of breath – the church becomes what the Nicene creed calls “one holy catholic and apostolic church” It is, as one commentary said, the democratization of holiness.

One of the marks of Pentecost is that the boundaries of conventional relationships, experiences and expectations are dissolved.

On April 21, a classical violinist named Philippe Quint left a rare Stradivarius violin valued at $4 million in the taxi cab he took from the Newark airport to Manhattan. The cab driver kept the violin at the airport taxi stand, and the police were able to assure Mr. Quint that it had been found and was safe. The driver, Mohammed Khalil, who has driven a Newark cab for more than 20 years, was awarded a medal by the city of Newark.

But the best thing that happened was a Pentecost experience that overturned conventional relationships, experiences and expectations for everybody present.

On May 7, Richard G. Jones reported this in The New York Times:

“The violinist stood on a makeshift stage between two lampposts crowded with a patina of bird droppings, under a weathered vinyl canopy hastily erected outside Newark Liberty International Airport in the taxicab holding area. The audience watched him in awe, about 50 drivers in three rows, their yellow cabs a few feet behind, some lined up neatly, others askew.

“As Philippe Quint spent half an hour playing five selections, the cabbies clapped and whistled. They danced in the aisles, hips gyrating like tipsy belly dancers. ‘Magic fingers, magic fingers,’ one called out.”

The report goes on to describe a driver dancing across the front of the makeshift stage with Mr. Quint’s manager, and a mob scene as driver sought his autograph on whatever napkin, receipt or dollar bill they had handy.

Mr. Quint, the classical violinists commented, “It was so pleasing to see people dancing—that never happens…These people, they work so hard, I doubt they get a chance to get out to Carnegie Hall or Lincoln Center.”

One audience member was particularly articulate about what had happened here. After listening to Paganini variation, a Gershwin number, and a piece from Massenet’s opera, as well as an original composition played with guitarist Michael Bacon, Ebenezer Sarpeh, a native of Ghana noted that it was the first recital by a classical violinist that he had ever attended. “And yeah, the music, I like it.”

There was spontaneous applause. There was moon walking. This was most decidedly not Carnegie Hall.

New people hearing old music in a new setting. Moonwalking to classical music. If that isn’t Pentecost, I don’t know what is.

But there’s something else here. There is the new family that is created in this community of taxi drivers – a cosmopolitan crowd of mostly men from all over the globe. “If one cabby does something good, we feel like we all do something good,” said Patrick Cosmeus, who has found only a cell phone or two in his cab. “But everything we find, we always return it,” he added.

If Philippe Quint had not forgotten his violin, he would never have known about the spirit of life that breathes in the community of taxi drivers at Newark airport.

That’s the spirit that God is breathing – that’s the spirit that blows with the wind. And that’s the spirit against whom we close the windows and from whom we guard ourselves.

We prefer self-righteous behavior and codes of conduct to govern our breath. But Jesus had a last word for the disciples in the gospel of John’s Pentecost story. It is not this story. It is more private. It takes place among the closest family unit – the disciples locked in a room together. And Jesus breathes his spirit upon them and speaks of forgiveness. The mark of the church is forgiveness (John 20: 22 and 23)

If there is any place where the necessity of forgiveness is greater than in our families of origin, I don’t know where that would be. Those we love the most hurt us the most. Those who love us the most and most deeply hurt by us. When the circumstances of life take our loved ones from us, it is the deepest human pain.

But there is another family – a family created not by legal contract or DNA – but by the breath and spirit of God. It is a healing place for broken people; a found place for lost people.

It is called church. It’s as broken as any other family. But it’s a community built on learning to love as God loves, forgive as God forgives, serve as Jesus serves, live as Jesus teaches, breathe as the spirit breathes, move as the spirit moves.

We can dance. In church. Anytime the spirit tells us to. We can shout. In church. Anytime the spirit tells us to. We can be people filled with joy that God has given us not just our family, but God’s family.

This family has a job to do in the world. It is to go out and play our violin and sing our songs on the street corners, and among the strangers, and to rejoice – that though we once were lost – we now are found.

The spirit gives us the power. Jesus promised. Do you believe in that promise?

Friends – our Pentecost life is going to look more like the Newark Taxi stand than Carnegie Hall – are you willing to go where the power of the spirit is – be blown where the winds will blow – breathe the life that God offers?

Then – we are Pentecost family! Amen!