"We Didn't Start the Fire" (May 24, 2026 Sermon)

Fire spreads, rules tighten, and Moses refuses to panic.

We’re preaching Pentecost through a story many people skip: Numbers 11 and the unexpected prophets Eldad and Medad. Moses is exhausted from carrying the weight of leadership in the wilderness, so God shares the Spirit with seventy elders to help guide the people. It’s orderly, practical, and honestly pretty reasonable. Then the Spirit does what the Spirit does and lands on two men who aren’t even inside the tent of meeting.

That’s where the tension hits. Joshua sees Spirit-led leadership happening “out of bounds” and blurts out the line that still echoes through church history: “My lord Moses, stop them.” We sit with how familiar that reflex is, from who gets to preach to who gets heard, who gets trusted, and who gets told to slow down. We also name the difference between life-giving process and gatekeeping that turns a tent into a wall, because walls are terrible conductors of the Holy Spirit.

Moses answers with both clarity and hope: “Are you jealous for my sake?” and “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets.” That becomes our Pentecost takeaway: we didn’t start the fire of the Spirit, and we were never meant to contain it. If you’re hungry for a sermon about spiritual gifts, church leadership, inclusion, and the wild freedom of the Holy Spirit, press play, then subscribe, share this with a friend, and leave a review so more people can find it.

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Transcript

Prayer And Scripture Reading

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Please pray with me today's prayer for illumination. Almighty God, by the power of your Holy Spirit, speak to us in the language of our hearts that we may hear your word and understanding and answer your call with confidence. Amen. The first lesson today is from Numbers chapter 11, verses 24 through 30. So Moses went out and told the people the words of the Lord, and he gathered seventy of the elders of the people and placed them all around the tent. Then the Lord came down in the cloud and spoke to him and took some of the spirit that was on him and put it on the seventy elders. And when the spirit rested upon them, they prophesied, but they did not do so again. Two men remained in the camp, one named Eldad and the other named Medad. And the spirit rested on them. They were among those registered, but they had not gone out to the tent. So they prophesied in the camp. And a young man ran and told Moses, Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp. And Joshua, son of Nun, the assistant of Moses, one of his chosen men, said, My Lord Moses, stop them. But Moses said to him, Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord's people were prophets, and the Lord would put his spirit on them. And Moses and the elders of Israel returned to the camp. Holy wisdom, holy word. Thank you.

Billy Joel Hook And Pentecost Recap

SPEAKER_01 1:33

All right, friends, I hope you Billy Joel fans are enjoying the title of the sermon today. I've waited a very long time, and I do have to get something off my chest. Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnny Ray, South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio, Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Sudar Baker Television, North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe. There you go. That's all I'm gonna do. I just had to get that off my chest. If you want to get history lesson and you don't know Billy Joel's song, We Didn't Start the Fire, go listen to that Jim of a song, although I'm told that he actually hates it and never wants to play it again. Folks, it's Pentecost Sunday, and in the interest of time, we're gonna forego our next reading, which I trust for most of you all is a very uh familiar uh passage in Acts chapter two. Let me summarize it very quickly. A lot of people from different nations, from different um cultures, from different languages get together in an upper room, and the Holy Spirit comes on tongues as if this wild wind settles on each of their heads, and all of a sudden they can understand each other. If you know the story of Babel in chapter of Gen in uh in the book of Genesis, it's kind of like the opposite of that. Where at the beginning of that story, they could all understand their own, they could all understand each other, and by the end of Babel they couldn't. Pentecost is kind of like the opposite. At the beginning they couldn't understand each other, but at the end, they could. And because all this is going down, people accuse the uh the Christians, the early Christians, of being drunk, at which point Peter gives one of my favorite lines in the Bible, which is we're not drunk. It's only 9 a.m. in the morning. Um, and then he begins to prophesy and say, no, no, God is doing a new thing. The Holy Spirit is wild and it is on the loose, and that is our Acts passage. But for today, I thought I'd mix things up a little bit and focus almost exclusively on the passage that Lisa read for us from the book of Numbers, with these two characters that we read about, Eldad and Medad, which is also about the Spirit. So I hope that we will open our hearts for that this day. Friends, let us pray. O Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable and pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

Moses Hits A Leadership Wall

SPEAKER_01 3:54

So sometimes accidents happen. Or sometimes what we think are accidents were never really accidents in the first place. Such was the case in this curious story that we turn to this Pentecost Sunday from the book of Numbers. As I mentioned, I believe that most of us are probably very familiar with the other story from Acts chapter 2, the story of Pentecost, since we read it usually every single Pentecost Sunday. But I think many of us are far less familiar, myself included, with the story of these two little-known Old Testament characters, Eldad and Medad. Say their names with me. Eldad and Medad, who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or maybe at the right place in the right time. That, friends, is for you to decide. But first, let's back up just a bit and remind ourselves about the book of Numbers. The book of Numbers is all about the Israelites wandering in the desert. They're tired, they're grumpy, and the manna, that flaky substance God gave them to eat every day, was getting, well, old. Like children complaining about four-day-old leftover casserole. The Israelites start to complain and grumble. The anonymous letters begin showing up on Moses' desk. People start coming to him and saying, you know, some people are beginning to say. And to make matters worse, I like to imagine that Moses' therapist was on sabbatical in the Mediterranean, so he's about at his wit's end. So he does what he's supposed to do. He goes to God. He says, Listen here, O holy provider of repetitive carbohydrates. These people are driving me nuts. My father-in-law Jethro even came up to me the other day and told me that I needed help, that doing all of this by myself is no good. These are your people, God. Do something, or I'm peaceing out. After thinking it over, God gives Moses a game plan. He listens to Moses' complaint and he tells him to go assemble 70 people, 70 potential leaders, and to bring them to the tabernacle, which was kind of a tent, sometimes called the tent of meeting, which was at the center of camp where the people gathered. It was basically a portable sanctuary that the Israelites took around with them wherever they went. And then at this gathering, those gathered, those gathered receive, are to receive some of the spirits that God has given to Moses. This will ordain and commission them to help Moses carry the burden of leadership among the twelve tribes. So to understand what's about to go down, you have to remember how the Israelites thought of God's spirit. God's spirit was a very tangible thing. It wasn't just spiritual or metaphorical. It was something that they felt and that they could see. You may remember some of the stories of the Old Testament with Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with God's spirit so infused in him that he lit up like a divine LED bulb with no dimmer switch. You can think of Moses as one of those glow-in-the-dark stars that we put on the ceiling of our children's bedrooms that charge in the light of the sun and then illuminate on their own at night. So there is this idea that God's spirit could be transferred from God to Moses, and then as we see in this passage from Moses to someone else. You know, it's not unlike what we're going to do next week when we lay hands on elders or when we lay our hands on youth who are newly confirmed, as I said will be the case next week with Jaden and Gavin. It's kind of the same idea. Well, Moses and Joshua select the seventy people and they welcome them to the tent of meeting, and they go about laying their hands on them, perhaps, and share the spirit of God that previously had just been Moses's alone. And it works. The seventy elders, if you will, go out and go about their commissioned work to help Moses lead the people.

What Prophecy Means In Practice

SPEAKER_01 8:22

The Bible gives us this word prophesy. It says that they went out and prophesied, which I doubt is a word that you and I use frequently in our modern vernacular. We often associate it with fortune telling, or they're telling the future. And while that may have been a small part of it, it really just means discernment. The seventy elders discerned God's will with Moses, discerned God's will for the Israelites as they resolved their conflicts, as they sought continued faithfulness to the God who had rescued them from Pharaoh. Decent and in order, you might say, as we Presbyterians are wont to do. There was only one problem. God's spirit, despite the ways that we try to collect it and control it and define it and share it, has a funny way of going rogue. And that's exactly what happens. Eldad and Medad are seemingly two random Israelite men who happen to be near enough to the tent of meeting, but not inside of it, but just close enough to apparently receive some of that spirit that got doled out.

Eldad And Medad Catch Fire

SPEAKER_01 9:33

I like to imagine the two of them walking by innocently talking about some mundane thing, like the new way they finally learned to cook up manna so it doesn't taste like manna. And then all of a sudden, bam, they suddenly break out into every time I feel the spirit moving in my heart, I will pray. That's not in the Bible, but I wish that it were. Soon enough, Eldad and Medad jump into helping lead the people. They're leading prayer groups all of a sudden. They're sharing their new manna recipes with their fellow manna-weary companions. They're pitching in to fix broken the broken tents of the widows or the foreigners who have joined the Israelites on their journey, and are generally just making sure that everybody is part of the neighborhood, since that's what disciples do. They weren't causing any harm that we're aware of, and everything was fine until someone else noticed that Eldad and Medad weren't in the tent of meeting with the other 70. They were likewise, that were likewise helping Moses carry out the burden of leadership. This person then goes and tattles on them. Moses, Moses, he said, Eldad and Medad are doing our thing. They're prophesying, but they didn't get the special sauce like the rest of us, or at least not the way that we did. And then Joshua, Moses' right-hand man, chimes in with an even more succinct statement of opposition. My Lord Moses, stop them.

Stop Them And Our Gatekeeping Reflex

SPEAKER_01 11:10

Stop them. Two words. Just like that. Joshua becomes the first recorded church moderator to call a point of order, which I have done on many occasions. But before we laugh too hard at Joshua, let's be honest with ourselves. The impulse to say stop them, to look at someone being moved by the spirit and say, no, no, no, not like that. Not them, not here, is not some ancient artifact that belongs way back in those times. If we're being uncomfortably candid, it is one of the most persistent and well-documented reflexes in history. For centuries, whenever women sensed that same spirit stirring within them, calling them to preach, to lead, to stand behind pulpits and before congregations, the church's collective Joshua stood up and said, Stop them. Not usually with a shout, but with a polite procedural language, with theology that conveniently preserved the existing order. The Wesleyan and Holiness movements began to crack that door open in the 19th century, and the spirit rushed through as it always done when given the smallest gap. And yet in many corners of Christianity, that argument is still being held today. Stop them, as if somehow the spirit checks ordination prerequisites before descending. When black men and women began to lead, to run for elected office with their gifts and citizenship, which their gifts and citizenship had every right to inhabit, the cry was the same. Stop them. Sometimes it came with poll taxes and literacy tests and other Jim Crow laws that may have looked like neutral standards of competency, but functioned as ropes in front of the door of democracy. Sometimes it came and comes with gerrymandered maps drawn like elaborate mazes to ensure that certain communities' voices were condemned to irrelevance before they ever reached the halls of power. The architects of those systems would have told you with a straight face that they were simply maintaining order, keeping things decent, just like Joshua. And when our LGBT siblings began to say, We too feel the Spirit, we too have been called, we too have something to offer the Church of Jesus Christ. That church so often said the same words. Slow them down, add another committee, have another discernment process, add another layer of gatekeeping that somehow never applies with the same rigor to people like me who were already on the inside. I want to get personal here for a moment because this isn't abstract for me. I am a trained theologian, preacher, and pastor. I have jumped through hoops, I've gotten the graduate degrees, I've done the ordination exams, the chaplaincy internships, I've been in those committee meetings where somebody else got to decide whether or not I was ready to do what I'm doing today. And for the most part, I'm glad that those processes exist. They shaped me, they humbled me on many an occasion, they made me better. But here is what I also know: that many of the people who helped me along that road, the seminary professors who cracked open the scriptures for me in new ways I had never imagined, the seasoned pastors who sat with me in my worst moments of doubt, the church workers, the music directors, the organists, the elders, the mentors who poured themselves into my formation, many of them could not have held those positions when many of us here at Guilford Park were born. Women, persons of color, LGBT individuals, they were the L dads and the me dads of their own generation. Gifted and called and set ablaze by that same spirit and told in a hundred polite and procedural ways to sit down and to be quiet. But they didn't. And thanks be to God for that. And because they didn't, because the church, slowly and imperfectly and often under great pressure, eventually opened the tent a little a little wider, I am the pastor that I am today, still learning. And I think that I am better for it. I think this congregation is better for it. And I believe that the church with the big C is better for it because every time we let go a little bit of our gatekeeping instincts, even a little, the body of Christ begins to look a little more like the God in whose image every single one of us was made. The Imago Day, the image of God, doesn't fit neatly into anyone's face, anyone's voice, anyone nationality or country or political party. It takes all of us. It always has.

We Cannot Manage The Spirit

SPEAKER_01 16:14

So I want us to notice that the process the problem was not the process itself. Decent and orderly ways of doing things are not inherently wrong. The tent of meeting was a good idea. Having a process for commissioning leadership is a good idea. Structure serves the community, but when structure hardens, when it stops to ask why it exists, it stops being a tent of meeting and it starts being a wall of exclusion. And walls are not really good conductors of the Holy Spirit. So I think Moses knew something that Joshua hadn't learned yet: that we simply cannot manage the Spirit of God. We can build the most beautiful tabernacle, we can follow the most careful procedure, we can select the most qualified 70 people, and the Holy Spirit will still find Eldad and Medad and others like them out there and set them on fire. And so Moses' reply to Joshua's condemnation is very simple. He begins with that accusation, Are you jealous for my sake? In other words, he's saying, he's calling out Joshua's self-centered argument and says, This is not about you, this is not about me, this is about God and what God is doing among us. And then the next thing Moses says is this beautiful statement. Would that all the Lord's people were prophets and that the Lord would put his spirit on them? Moses looks at all of these people with all their messes and their gifts, their grief and their hunger, their broken tents and their terrible manna recipes, and says, I wish the spirit would land on every single one of them. Not just the 70, not just the credentialed, not just the ones who showed up at the right place or the right time, but all of them. And so again, yes, I really wanted to title this sermon, We Didn't Start the Fire, just purely from a selfish place. I've always wanted to do it. But I do think that it works because we didn't start the fire. We didn't start it when the children lit the candles with Miss Kim this morning. We didn't start it when we prayed the liturgy, or Bill, Brian, and Kim and Jane and I planned the worship order or printed the bulletin. We didn't start it on the day of our baptism, or on the Sunday we were confirmed, or the morning we were ordained. That fire was burning long before any of us got here. It was burning in the desert when Eldad and Medad stumbled into its radius on their way home from wherever they happened to be coming from. It burned in that upper room in Jerusalem on that day of Pentecost, and it has been burning through every cracked door and every silenced voice that refuses to stay silent. We didn't start it and we can't put it out how much we may try. But I also want us to remember on this Pentecost Sunday that if we didn't start the fire, then we were also never meant to contain it. That fire is a gift, the spirit is a gift. Pentecost is not the church's, just the church's birthday party when we congratulate ourselves for keeping that flame going, but it's the annual reminder that the flame was never ours to manage in the first place. We are just recipients, we're just vessels, we're just glow-in-the-dark stars that only shine because something else, God's Spirit, has charged us up. And so we give it away. So in the spirit of Moses, who, when confronted with the possibility that God's Spirit might be spilling out beyond the borders of the expected, threw open his arms and said, Yes, let it be

Would That Prayer For The World

SPEAKER_01 19:48

so. I want us to close with a prayer, a longing, a litany of would that's for this church and for the world. Because Moses said, Would that all the Lord's people were prophets? So would that all of us worked harder and sacrificed more to ensure that everybody in this country has equal, unencumbered access to the ballot box. Because a democracy that makes some voices louder by making others quiet is not decent, it is not orderly, and it is not of God. Would that all of us built a world where no one has to choose between a prescription and a meal, where no child ever goes to bed hungry, and where I can't afford to see the doctor is a sentence that never has to be spoken again. Wouldn't that be nice? Would that all of us stopped referring to the young people in our pews as the future of the church, and the older saints among us as the past of the church, and instead saw what is actually true, that we are all of us together the present of the church, and that God needs each and every one of us right now. Would that all of us treated the immigrants and the refugee and the foreigner in the camp, and there are foreigners in every camp with the same dignity that you and I would extend our own children, because the Israelites were foreigners too, and they were told, along with us, to never forget. Would that all of us learned to be a little more, and I'm including myself in this, y'all, to be a little more like Moses, a little less like Joshua, a little less anxious about who's in the tent, and a little more astonished at the Holy Spirit that's moving outside of it. In the name of God, the creator, redeemer, and sustainer, may all of us God's beloved children say, Amen.