Acts 2: 1-21 John 14: 8-17
Here we are again decked out in red, celebrating The Day of Pentecost 2022. It’s rather odd when you think about it. Pentecost is a Jewish Celebration, 50 days after Passover. It was originally a sort of Harvest Festival, then it became a commemoration of the giving of the Law to Moses. A very important day for the Jews. It’s an important day for us too, because of what happened at that one particular Pentecost, the events described in our first reading today. The coming of the Holy Spirit.
But that wasn’t really the beginning.
Throughout the Old Testament there are wonderful pictures of the Spirit of God, present and powerful. In the very first verses of Genesis, in the account of creation itself, the Holy Spirit is described as a wind from God, the breath of God, hovering over the face of the dark water, while the earth was still formless and empty. Psalm 104 speaks of the Holy Spirit sent forth from God the creator, continually renewing the face of the earth. The dry scattered bones of Ezekiel’s vision1 needed only one thing to assemble themselves and rise into life again, the breath of God’s life-giving Spirit.
In the wilderness the Holy Spirit appeared to Moses2 in-the-midst of a burning bush, calling him away from his flocks into the leadership of the Israelites. still oppressed and captive in Egypt.
And as they wandered through the wilderness, the Holy Spirit led them in columns of fire and cloud. We read about the craftsmen who decorated the tabernacle about judges and kings and prophets of Israel, each receiving the qualities necessary at the time to fulfil their assigned mission each one inspired to deeds above and beyond what would normally be expected of them.
All through the Old Testament we have these pictures of the Holy Spirit, energising and equipping
and guiding particular people for specific tasks in the God’s service.
Jesus in today’s gospel gives his disciples a new understanding of the Holy Spirit and a new promise to them, and to those who will follow in their footsteps. If we read the whole of John’s Gospel straight through, things slow down at about Chapter 14 where we are today. The scene is the upper room.
The last supper is over, Judas has left in a hurry. The disciples’ feet are washed and clean. Jesus puts aside the basin and the towel, the symbols he has shown them of true servanthood, and he begins to talk. He continues on, for four chapters or so, telling his friends all they need to know before he leaves them. He reassures them that he’ll be back, but he doesn’t say when. But where is he going?
The way he tells it he is going back to his father and leaving them in charge while he’s gone.
He talks about himself as the way and the truth and the life, as the life-giving true vine nourishing and sustaining all those who follow him. He struggles to describe in inadequate words the boundless love flowing between himself and his father, overflowing from himself and his father to the people who are to become his church.
Then he tells them what they are to do while he is gone.
“Love me’, he says, and love one another.’ Jesus is not talking here about things we often tend to associate with love, warm emotions, the comfort, and security we feel in close relationships, the knowledge that our well–being comes first in the consideration of some other person. These things are important, but not all-encompassing. To Jesus love is much simpler than that.
For him love is first of all, a commitment to the commandments that call us to serve him, and to serve our neighbour.
For Jesus, love is obedience. “If you love me’, he says to his friends in the upper room, ‘you will keep my commandments.’
Paul describes this kind of love in his first letter to the Corinthian church. Love is patience and kindness, an active rejoicing in the right, believing and hoping, forgiving, and trusting, and persevering to the end.
How were Jesus’ friends to live out this kind of love without him? How were they to embody that selfless love after he had gone? Imagine their feelings of loss and despair.
We can look back at this scene knowing the outcome, the terrible events of Gethsemane and Calvary, and the Easter joy of the resurrection.
But the disciples in that upper room on the evening before Jesus’ crucifixion had no such knowledge. Jesus had told them so much, and they had had no time to reflect on it all.
Jesus understood just how bereft and lost they were going to feel, and he reassures them. ‘Don’t be afraid’, he says ‘Believe in God, believe also in me’. ‘Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing’. ‘They will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever.’
Jesus gift to each one of them and to all those future followers who will come to know and love him too, will be, he says, the gift of his Holy Spirit, counsellor and helper, someone who will be with them not just at times of particular challenge, as in the ancient scriptures, but always, every moment of every day, celebrating with them, comforting them in sorrow, and in times of hardship and conflict, defending, guiding and instructing them, inspiring them always to continue his mission to make the Father known.
Jesus was not able to reveal all the wonders of God during his brief lifetime among us.
It was to be the Holy Spirit sent by him from the Father, he said, who would accompany his church, his body into the future, continuing to unfold all that is meant by the mystery of Jesus among us
Pentecost:
So, there they were on that particular Pentecost, waiting and praying in Jerusalem as Jesus had told them to. By this time over 100 had been added to their number.
In the intervening weeks right from their discovery of Jesus’ empty tomb the disciples had continued to struggle with experiences on the very edge of their human understanding. Early on he had appeared to them as they hid, fearful for their own safety, in a locked room
He had offered them his peace, then to reassure them of the reality of his body, he had shown them the terrible wounds of the crucifixion on his hands, and then he had disappeared from the locked room, as mysteriously as he had come to them.
On another occasion a stranger had joined two of the disciples on the road to Emmaus, and as they walked together, he had opened for them both new understandings of the scriptures. Not until later when they sat down to a meal, did the two of them recognise their risen master, then he simply disappeared from their sight.
Another day he had hailed the disciples from the beach with some fishing advice as they worked the nets from their boat offshore. He spoke with Peter, this broken man who despised himself for betraying and denying his Lord, to the fearless shepherd of Jesus’ flock that he would become.
And so, it went on during those weeks. Jesus appearing on many occasions to different people, seemingly moving effortlessly from the dimension of heaven into the world of time and place that we inhabit. Each time leaving a word, a memory, for the disciples to add to all they knew then of Jesus,
and all they would recall later. They needed it all, because they still hadn’t made the paradigm shift in their thinking that Jesus was asking of them.
In spite, of all that had happened in those intervening weeks, they were still thinking of Jesus as their earthly king who would restore the fortunes of Israel.
So, there they were, waiting for they knew not what, wondering what they were going to do without him, when they heard something like the roar of a hurricane. Before any of them had had time to register, the power from heaven had rushed through the entire building where they were gathered, striking sparks that burst into flame above their heads.
They were filled up with it, every one of them filled to the brim, with the very breath of God.
Then they all breathed out, and the air came out of them in languages they didn’t even know they knew. They set up such a racket that they drew a crowd.
People from all over the world, in Jerusalem for Pentecost, came pushing through the doors leaning in the windows, on the lookout for their own countrymen, surprised to hear their own native languages so far from home. But all they found in the place was an excited group of Galileans, simple, unlearned country people from Northern Israel, all of them going on and on in an amazing collection of Middle Eastern languages about the mighty acts of God.
Then Peter, the simple fisherman who had slept through Jesus’ agony in the garden of Gethsemane,
the friend who had run away, and then denied Jesus, this same Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, preached a sermon of great eloquence and power. Beginning with the prophecy of Joel.
By the end of that day, the church, this newly born body of Christ, had grown from 120 to more than 3000.
In the days to come, disciples discovered abilities in themselves that they never knew they had.
When they spoke, they spoke the words of Jesus. When they laid their hands on the sick, it was as if Jesus himself had touched them. Frightened people became brave, shy people became bold and wanderers found a sense of direction in their lives. They were doing things they had never seen anyone but him do. There was no explanation, except they had dared to breathe in, on the day of Pentecost.
They had drawn in God’s own breath, and they had been transformed. The Holy Spirit had filled them.
The body of believers had received the breath of life from their Lord, and they would pass it on, using their own bodies and their own lives to distribute the gift.
Luke’s Book of Acts is the story of their adventures, the story of what happened then. It tells the good news of what God did when his Holy Spirit breathed on a crowd of confused timid waverers and transformed them into a force that changed history.
It happened for John Wesley in that way back at the beginning of the 18th century. He was a faithful Christian all his life. He was ordained a priest in the Church of England in his mid-20’s, but he had no assurance in his heart that Jesus had died for him, and that Jesus was his Saviour and friend. He didn’t know the joy of the Holy Spirit in his life. The way to God, he believed, was through good works, `avoidance of sin’, and strict discipline in every aspect of his life.
His ministry in those early years, needless to say, was barren and fruitless. For years he felt an emptiness and with it, a yearning for something more in both his life and ministry. Then at the age of 33, one day, as he sat in a Christian meeting, listening to the speaker talking about the love of Jesus, and the presence of the Holy Spirit in the lives of Christians, he felt, as he said, his heart strangely warmed. In that moment as the Holy Spirit breathed into him, he yearning was satisfied, and the whole future direction of his life changed and was set.
From that one small beginning, and over many years, one man touched and empowered by the Holy Spirit, set off a tide of renewal a travelling outdoor preaching ministry with congregations of thousands ~ that spread across the whole of English Society of that time and that was taken later to America by Irish believers converted by him in Britain.
In John Wesley’s lifetime this movement became known as the Methodist Church. Growing in number worldwide by the end of his life from 4 to132 000, and it began with the Holy Spirit’s inspiration in the life of one man ~ and that man’s wholehearted lifelong response.
What about us?
How do we allow the Holy Spirit of Jesus the freedom to blow through our lives rearranging things changing things, showing us new possibilities? Do we believe in a God who still acts as he did amongst that Pentecost gathering so long ago?
We say so, every Sunday, as we recite the creed together…
‘We believe in the Holy Spirit, The Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son….
who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified…
That Pentecost wind, `that power of the Spirit came straight from heaven and still does for us too. Do we believe in a God who breathes through closed doors and sets our heads and hearts on fire? A God who can transform us too, and go on transforming us as individuals and as a community of faith?
A God who can continue growing his church here in this place, and through us, touch hearts and lives in our community in ways we haven’t thought of yet?
Or do we come sometimes to a sort of unspoken agreement that God is here to hear our prayer requests, but not really after all this time into the business of actually changing lives?
How deadening is that, when the Holy Spirit is life and health and renewal?
He is Jesus’ precious gift to each one of us, and as with any gift, we are free to reject, ignore, turn away, or resolve to open the gift tomorrow. Our choice! As individuals, or as Christ’s body here in Taroona & Sandy Bay, the only way to receive him into our lives is to welcome his presence daily, to pray: Come Holy Spirit! as often as we can, as often as we need to ~ and wait in expectation for his response. He will respond with his promise I am with you! Then we take our courage in both hands and act on his promise. Sometimes that is the hardest part of all.
Once we get the hang of it the evidence of his answer to our prayer is easier and easier to spot. And that builds our faith. Reflect on the presence of The Holy Spirit in your life, say, last week, and count your blessings!
Whenever you find yourself speaking with an eloquence you know you don’t have, or offering forgiveness you had not meant to offer, whenever you find yourself calm in the face of turmoil, whenever you feel yourself comforted in unbearable grief, whenever you find yourself taking risks you thought you didn’t have the courage to take, or reaching out to someone you had intended to walk away from, you can be pretty sure that the Holy Spirit is at work.
And more than that, you are part of the work, breathing in the breath of God, and giving him back to the world again in acts and words of love and courage of wisdom and forgiveness and generosity.
And that is what Jesus has asked us to do.
May God give each of us the grace to recognize afresh the indwelling, enabling, never-failing presence of His Holy Spirit.
May we give joyful thanks to him on this day of Pentecost, and act in faith on his promise to be with us always.
Amen
Prayer: God of power
May the boldness of your Spirit transform us
May the gentleness of your Spirit lead us,
May the gifts of your Spirit be our goal and our strength,
Now and always.
Amen