Pentecost 2015
Acts 2:1-21; John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15
Pentecost is a major Jewish feast—one of the three great feasts of the Torah called Sahvuoth which our Jewish brothers and sisters are celebrating in Johnson Hall. All the Jewish pilgrims would be gathered in Jerusalem for the feast. It is a feast of seven weeks, seven weeks times seven day is 49 days plus one after the Passover. That is why we have 50 days of the Easter season.
It has two meanings. It’s known as the feast of first-fruits from the garden and the fields. It was a dedication of the early sprouts as a thank offering and in anticipation of a full harvest at the end of the growing season. But there’s more. It’s the commemoration of the giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai where the congregation of Israel stood at the base of the mountain where God came down in wind and fire and spoke to them, 50 days after the Passover when they left Egypt as slaves.
After Jesus celebrated his last Passover with his disciples in the Upper Room, 49 days plus one after his first Easter, the signs and wonders of Mt. Sinai are repeated in Jerusalem. The God who spoke at Mt. Sinai now speaks to all who are gathered in Jerusalem, like delegates from around the world. But this is different: from now on God will speak in human voices, in every language in every land to get the good word out. In Jesus you get just one flesh-and blood, only begotten son; with the Spirit you get diversity, multiplicity, and ever-unfolding manifestation of God’s work through ordinary people like you and me.
It’s the feast of first-fruits. If Israel was the first-fruits of the people of God, now it’s the time to bring in the whole harvest of all nations, ethnicities, and orientations to become God’s people too, to receive the Holy Spirit, and bring all their gifts to God, the fruits of their own languages and music and traditions and cultures and history. With Jesus it’s one; with the Spirit it’s you the many. What Jesus has done by his life, death, resurrection and ascension is that God is in you with all your warts and wrinkles and beauty marks, using your aptitudes and gifts. Jesus couldn’t speak English; you can.
Jesus said it was better that he go away, because why he was with us in the flesh he was one particular person, taking up one space on the planet. But now that the Spirit of Jesus is on us think of what we can do. In John 14: 12 he said, “Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.” Just think of the hospitals, schools, clinics, churches, micro-businesses and development projects that have been built in his name. Yes, we also have the black eye of trying to westernize foreign people and aligning with colonial powers, but there are hidden histories behind that.
Pentecost is often the Cinderella of the Holy Trinity. We can wrap our head around God the Father, our Heavenly Parent and Creator. Jesus makes sense too—a human being just like us, living with life’s daily struggles, our brother, friend and Savior. The Holy Spirit is more difficult. How do we relate to an invisible spiritual entity? Perhaps that is why the biblical writers used word pictures and metaphors to get at something that frankly is unexplainable with ordinary language. The scriptures give us four images of the Spirit: wind, fire, water and earth. Let’s take them in the order.
The first one wind, is also breath. In the Hebrew Ruach mean wind, but it also means breath or Spirit. In the Greek wind is Pneuma and also breathe. So this of breath of God is the soul of God, if you will, God’s inner life, which God breathes into us. This is the soul that never is exhausted or expires, a soul that is pure love and faithfulness even inside our unlovely infidelities, the breath who forgives your sins and inspires you for do so for others.
You can’t see the wind, but you can certainly see the evidence of it. Look at how a straight wind flattens a forest like the trees were match stick. Maybe, like me, you wonder where the heck the Spirit is some days. The world is going to hell in a hand basket. The baby’s crying, you can’t find your keys, it’s trash day and you forgot to put it out again. It feels like anything but the breath of the Spirit. But fear not. Paul says the Spirit prays through us with sighs and groaning too deep for words. What you feel in yourself is the pressure and movement of the Spirit which rubs against your guilt until it is cleared away, makes you grieve until your grief is don, and erodes your selfishness until your self is made smooth. We call this inner spiritual work sanctification. It’s the process of growing more and more Christ-like as the Spirit expands your capacity to love, and inflates you to fill all those empty and inner places so quietly that you won’t feel it at all.
The second image is fire and fire is the presence of God. The burning bush in the desert, the flame of God’s power on Mt. Sinai, the pillar of fire by night to guide the Israelites from Egypt, the tongues of fire alighting upon the disciples at Pentecost. This is another sign of God’s own self. The Holy Spirit is both God’s energy and God’s own personality. And God is not tame like a fire is not tame. God can burn you in judgement when your conscience burns or your shame feels like fire with in. But the fire of God will also comfort you and warm you and keep you safe against the cold.
The third image is water. The Holy Spirt is the living water who satisfies your thirst and brings life to your dry and dusty soul. It’s the water that Jesus said would flow from your inner being. (John 7:38) The image Jesus uses is from Genesis 2:10 where God planted a garden in Eden and out of that garden four rivers flowed to water the earth. So with you, the Spirit rises out of you into the life you make, mixing God’s water with yours to keep you running fresh and purge you pollution.
The last image is the earth. That’s the place we all inhabit and where the Spirit is active. There is not artificial separation between the secular and the sacred. If you are filled with the Spirit all that you do is sacred. When we think the Spirit is our there or God is up there, we get the idea that God is like Superman who will swoop in whenever we need help or in trouble. But it is the Spirit who animates everyday life. The life of God is in the sap of the trees that feed the trunk and leaves. It is the power of the universe that keeps the stars burning and the planets in orbit. The Spirit is what fires the synapses in our brains and the love in our hearts. Of course, we know how to explain these things scientifically—it’s photosynthesis and gravity and neurons, but it’s in this stuff of life where we usually see the Spirit.
So you see, the Holy Spirit love diversity even as in the One Lord Jesus we find our unity. Even in the midst of our halting, passing and provisional efforts, mixed and broken, even those are places where the Spirit of God is active if we have the eyes of faith to look for it.
That is you members of this church. In spite of your mixed up, over worked, stressed out, frustrated selves you must believe in yourself as the work of God. Despite how broken and beaten down you may feel, you can believe in yourself because as the Church universal says in the Apostles’ Creed, “I believe in the Holy Spirit,” and that makes all the difference.
