"We Didn't Start the Fire" (May 24, 2026 Sermon)
/We Didn’t Start the Fire
Numbers 11:24–30
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 that the Lord would put his spirit on them!” And Moses and the elders of Israel returned to the camp.
Out in the Camp
Sometimes accidents happen. Or sometimes what we think are accidents were never really accidents in the first place. Such was the case in a curious story we turn to this Pentecost Sunday in the Book of Numbers. My suspicion is that most of you are familiar with the other story we read from Acts; after all, we read it pretty much every Pentecost Sunday. However, many of us are far less familiar with the story of two little-known Old Testament characters, Eldad and Medad, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or were they in the right place at the right time? That, friends, is for you to decide.
But first, let’s back up a bit. It’s the Book of Numbers, so the Israelites are 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 a four-day-old leftover casserole, the Israelites start to complain. The anonymous letters begin showing up on Moses’ desk. People start coming to him, saying, “You know, some people are beginning to say…” And to make matters worse, Moses’ therapist is on sabbatical in the Mediterranean, and he’s about at his wits’ end.
So he goes to God. “Listen here,” he says, “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 I need help, that doing all this by myself is no good. These are your people; do something, or I’m out!” After thinking it over, God gives Moses a game plan. God tells him to assemble 70 people and bring them to the Tabernacle, a tent at the center of the camp where the people gathered, essentially serving as a “portable sanctuary.” And at this gathering, those gathered are to receive some of the “spirit” that God has given to Moses. This will ordain and commission them to help Moses carry the burden of leadership among the twelve tribes.
To understand what is about to go down, we have to remember how the Israelites spoke of God’s “spirit.” God’s spirit was a very tangible thing; it wasn’t just a spiritual or metaphorical notion. Rather, it was something the Israelites felt, heard, and saw! You may remember the stories of 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 we put on the ceiling of our children’s bedrooms that charge in the light of the sun and then illuminate on their own. So there was this idea that God’s spirit could be transferred. Such is why we lay hands on elders when we ordain them or on youth when they get confirmed (as will be the case next week when we celebrate Jayden Vereen and Gavin Beale).
Well, Moses and Joshua select 70 people and welcome them to the Tent of Meeting to lay hands on them (perhaps) and share the spirit of God that had previously been Moses’ alone. It works, and the 70 “elders” go about their commissioned work to help Moses lead the people. The Bible gives us the word “prophesy,” which, admittedly, is a word I doubt you and I use frequently in our modern vernacular. We usually associate such a thing with fortune-telling or a soothsayer. And while there may have been a small component of that at the time, the deeper meaning of “prophecy” is discernment. The 70 elders discerned God’s will for the Israelites as they resolved their conflicts and sought continued faithfulness to the God who had rescued them from Pharaoh’s hand. 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 we try to collect it, control it, define it, and share it — has a funny way of going rogue. And that’s exactly what happens. Eldad and Medad are two random Israelite men who happen to be near enough the Tent of Meeting to apparently receive some of that spirit being doled out. I like to imagine the two of them walking by, talking about some mundane thing, like the new way they learned to cook up manna so it doesn’t taste like the same old same old. And then… BAM!…all of a sudden they break out into singing “Every time I feel the Spirit moving in my heart I will pray!” Soon enough, they are jumping in to help lead the people: leading prayer groups, sharing their new manna recipes with their fellow manna-weary companions, pitching in to fix the broken tents of the widows and foreigners who have joined the Israelites on their journey, and generally making sure that no one is left out.
Everything was fine until someone noticed that Eldad and Medad weren’t in the Tent of Meeting with the other 70, who were likewise helping Moses carry the burden of leadership. This person then goes and tattles on them. “Moses, Moses,” he says, “Eldad and Medad are doing our thing. They are prophesying, but they didn’t get the special sauce like the rest of us, or at least not the way we did!” Joshua, Moses’ right-hand man, chimes in with an even more succinct statement of opposition: “My Lord, Moses, stop them.”
“Stop them.” Two words. Just like that, Joshua becomes the first recorded church moderator to call a point of order.
The Oldest Reflex in the Room
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, not like that, not them, not here — is not some ancient artifact of desert wandering. 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 with a shout, usually, but with polite, procedural language. With theology that conveniently preserved the existing order. The Wesleyan and Holiness movements cracked that door open in the 19th century, and the Spirit rushed through, as it always does when given even the smallest gap. And yet, in many corners of global Christianity, that argument is still being had today — as if the Spirit somehow checks ordination prerequisites before descending.
When Black men and women began to lead, to run for elected office, 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 velvet ropes at the door of democracy. Sometimes it came 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 LGBTQIA+ siblings began to say, we too have felt the Spirit, we too have been called, we too have something to offer this body — the church, so often, said the same words. Slow them down. Add another committee, another discernment process, another layer of gatekeeping that somehow never applies with the same rigor to the people who already look like the people already inside.
I want to get personal for a moment because this isn’t abstract for me. I am a trained theologian, preacher, and pastor. I have jumped through the hoops — the graduate degrees, the ordination exams, the chaplaincy internships, the many committee meetings where someone else decided whether I was ready. And I am genuinely glad those processes exist. They shaped me. They humbled me. They made me better. But here is what I also know: many of the people who helped me most along that road — the seminary professors who cracked open the scriptures for me in ways I’d never imagined, the seasoned pastors who sat with me in my worst moments of doubt and showed me what faithful ministry actually looks like, the church workers, elders, and mentors who poured themselves into my formation — could not have held those positions when many of us here at Guilford Park were born. Women. People of color. LGBTQIA+ individuals. They were the Eldads and Medads of their own generation: gifted, called, set ablaze by the same Spirit, and told in a hundred polite and procedural ways to sit down and be quiet. But they didn’t. And because they didn’t, because the church — slowly, imperfectly, and often only under great pressure — eventually opened the tent a little wider, I am the pastor I am today. And I am better for it. This congregation is better for it. And I believe — I have to believe — that the church itself is better for it, because every time we release 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 Dei doesn’t fit neatly into any one face, any one voice, any one story. It takes all of us. It always has.
Here is what I want us to notice: the problem was never 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 structure — when it hardens, when it stops asking why it exists, when it begins to protect its own perpetuation more than the flourishing of the people it was meant to serve — stops being a tent of meeting and starts being a wall of exclusion. And walls, friends, are notoriously bad conductors of the Holy Spirit.
Moses knew something that Joshua hadn’t learned yet. You simply cannot manage the Spirit of God. You can build the most beautiful tabernacle, follow the most careful procedure, select the most qualified seventy people, and the Spirit will still find Eldad and Medad out there in the camp, talking about manna recipes, and set them ablaze anyway.
And so, Moses’ reply to Joshua’s condemnation is swift and poignant. He opens with a simple statement of accusation: “Are you jealous for my sake?” In other words, he calls out Joshua’s self-centering argument; this notion that this is all about Moses or Joshua. Moses gently but firmly reminds Joshua to check his ego at the door. “This isn’t about us,” Moses says, “this is about God and what God is doing among us.”
“Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put his spirit on them!”
Not just the seventy. Not just the credentialed. Not just the ones who showed up to the right tent at the right time. All of them.
We Didn’t Start the Fire
Which brings me, at long last, to the title of this sermon. I have to confess something. It has been a dream of mine — for years, honestly — to one day preach a Pentecost sermon called “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” Not for any particularly profound theological reason, mind you, but because Billy Joel is one of my favorite artists, and because I have been waiting for the right moment to justify it liturgically. Today, friends, is that day. You’re welcome.
But here’s the thing: what started as a shameless indulgence of my musical nostalgia turns out to be, I think, actually true. We didn’t start the fire.
We didn’t start it when we lit the candles this morning. We didn’t start it when we wrote the liturgy, planned the worship order, or printed the bulletin. We didn’t start it on the day of our baptism, or the Sunday we were confirmed, or the morning we were ordained. The fire — this wild, reckless, untameable Spirit of God — was burning long before any of us arrived. It was burning in the desert when Eldad and Medad stumbled into its radius on their way home from wherever they’d been. It was burning in that upper room in Jerusalem when the disciples were hiding behind locked doors and found themselves suddenly, inexplicably, on fire themselves. It has been burning through every cracked-open door, every silenced voice that refused to stay silent, every person who was told not them, not here, not now, and who prophesied anyway.
We didn’t start it. And we cannot put it out.
Carriers, Not Containers
But here’s the harder word, the one I want to leave with you on this Pentecost Sunday: if we didn’t start it, we were also never meant to contain it. The fire is a gift. The Spirit is a gift. Pentecost is not the church’s birthday party where we congratulate ourselves for having kept the flame going. Pentecost is the annual reminder that the flame was never ours to manage in the first place. We are recipients. Vessels. Glow-in-the-dark stars that only shine because something else charged us up.
And recipients of a gift this extravagant are called to do one thing above all else: 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 and the approved, threw open his arms and said yes, yes, let it be so — I want to close with a prayer. A longing. A litany of “would thats” for this church and for this world.
Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets —
Would that all of us worked harder and sacrificed more to ensure that every person in this country has equal, unencumbered access to the ballot box — because a democracy that makes some voices louder by making others quieter is not decent, and 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 goes to bed hungry, where “I can’t afford to see a doctor” is a sentence that belongs only to history books.
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, together, the present church — and that God has need of every single one of us right now.
Would that all of us treated the immigrant, the refugee, the foreigner in the camp — and there are foreigners in every camp — with the same dignity we would want extended to our own children, because the Israelites were once foreigners too, and they were told not to forget it.
Would that all of us learned to be a little more Moses and a little less Joshua — a little less anxious about who’s in the tent and a little more astonished that the Spirit keeps showing up outside of it.
In the name of God the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, may all of us, God’s children, say: Amen.