Texts — Acts 2:1-13 and Jonah 1:4-6; 14-17

Today is Pentecost Sunday.  It is also Memorial Day Sunday.  Pentecost celebrates the birth of the Christian Church with the coming of the Holy Spirit.  Memorial Day began as a recognition of soldiers who died in the Civil War and has since become a recognition of soldiers who have died in any war.

Do these two holidays intersect in anyway?  That might seem like a stretch — to connect the Holy Spirit with any celebration involving war, especially when we’re in the midst of a war in Iraq that seems to be making the world more dangerous.  But I do think these two celebrations point in the same direction at least in one sense.  They both, in a dramatic way, raise the question, “What are we doing with our lives?”

This is the most basic question we can ask.  I think we all hunger and dream to do something big, something important with out lives, even if most of the time we’re busy just putting one for in front of the other dealing with what’s right in front of us. 

Last Sunday, we sent Daniel Weybright off to Marine boot camp.  This was hard to do.  This doesn’t strike most of us as the best time to send someone we love off to the Marines.  But I think Daniel went because he wants to be a part of the big picture; he wants to do something challenging and exciting.  Whatever else we may think of being in the Marines right now, it does have a certain gravity.  I’m sure we can all agree on that.

What part do the rest of play in this big bewildering picture that we call creation? 

Many of you have been saying we need something big and bold to do —something that will set us on fire.  This is a vision that needs to evolve and it needs a lot of details to be worked out, but this is the basic idea I promised to share with you this morning.

Imagine a separate non-profit corporation under the name, the “Jonah Center for Earth and Art.”  On behalf of this organization, we raise the money to buy or use a piece of land in Middletown.  Maybe we’d save some of the remaining farmland from being subdivided into building lots.  Maybe this would be in the north end, near the recycling center, or near the Mattabesett River.  The particular property we end up would shape the idea in one direction or another.

One part of the mission would be to experiment with and apply technology such as passive and active solar power, wind power, biomass generation (turning all the rotting food discarded by local supermarkets and restaurants into electricity), bio-diesel generation (turning all the discarded frying oil from restaurants into electricity), fuel cell energy, hydroponic vegetable gardening, fish farming, water recycling, all the things that we Americans need to do to make life in our city and on our planet earth more sustainable, and for our nation to be more of a blessing and less of a menace to the world.  (Part of my inspiration for this came from an article in the New York Times about a guy who farms tilapia fish in his Brooklyn apartment.  Tilapia are a fast growing and very tasty kind of fish native and abundant in the sea of Galilee.  Jesus probably ate Tilapia with his disciples on the shore.)

All of these technologies would be woven together in a visually exciting way, to attract people and demonstrate how these technologies work.  Imagine a tube-like aquarium with plants and bubbles, back-lit and filled with fish and other life-forms, powered by solar panels, methane tapped at the landfill or from human sewage, or a fuel cell as just one way such high and low technology could be woven together.  Displays would explain how bio-mass generators and fuel cells work.  Another display would show how a fuel cell could power a house.  An outdoor display could show how wetlands function in the web of life.  You get the idea.  The possibilities are vast.

For the second part of the mission, and another way we’d get people to come and see the technology in action, would be to have this water-gardening and fish farming and power generation woven together in a building with movable seating and lighting that would function as a very flexible, small scale performing arts center, for music, for community theater, for interfaith worship (not associated with any specific community or denomination) and community organizations.  Users would pay to support the building.  The result: science and technology woven together with performing arts and spiritual community, all of it in one place and in relationship to each other, as they should be.

Where does the name Jonah fit in?  Imagine this building constructed so that, when you’re inside it would give the effect of being inside of a whale, with the ribs coming down on the side.  The door would be the mouth of the whale. 

The reason I thought of Jonah as the central myth of this project is because Jonah was a prophet. 

But Jonah didn’t become a prophet because he was better than other people.  He didn’t want to be a prophet.  He started his career running away from being a prophet.  He was unwilling.  He answered his call to be a prophet by setting out in the exact opposite direction.  We’re sort of like that, in terms of how easily we can ignore the non-sustainability of the way we live now — hooked on fossil fuels, wasteful land use, and all the rest.

But something bigger than Jonah’s resistance swallowed him up, spit him out on shore, and changed Jonah’s mind.  That’s like us too.  We have to turn in another direction as a society.

We all long to be part of something big.  The church itself is big.  The church is huge.  It’s one of the longest-running shows in history.  But the church needs to keep finding ways to push and stay enthusiastic about our mission and purpose.

The promising thing about this vision of a Jonah Center for Earth and Art is that it would take, and I think it would attract, many different people with many different skills and interests.  It could even provide some employment.  It would be another way Middletown could be on the cutting edge and give people another reason to come to Middletown. 

I look forward to hearing if any of you are as excited about this vision as I am.  I’m testing the vision on you.  This will require a lot of people’s enthusiasm over a long time.  This is a ten year project.  And that actually seems to me to be one of its main virtues.

Here we are on this planet.  We have just a few years, a brief moment, to be alive with this other life around us.  We don’t know how we got here.  We didn’t deserve to be here.  Before long, none of us will be here any more.  But while we’re here, there’s a Holy Spirit we can catch. 

Is this vision I’ve sketched a vision from God?  Is this something that God is ready to make happen?  We have all the human skills and resources right in this congregation to drive this vision, but it will take many other people beyond us to make it happen. 

For now, I offer this vision to God and to all of you.  Who knows what God might do with it, or what will become of it?  It’s totally open at this point, and it can morph and mutate in just about any direction.

Let’s give our imaginations some free rein.  Imagine how it would feel for the wave of the Holy Spirit to do something new, creative, and important with us?