Pentecost
Year A 2014
Father Adam Trambley
June 8, 2014 St.John’s Sharon
Note: There were some technical difficulties getting this printed and saved Sunday morning. What is here may be rougher than the final version.
Today is Pentecost.
Pentecost is the church’s primary liturgical celebration of the Holy
Spirit. Fifty days after Easter, the
Holy Spirit descended on the disciples gathered in an upper room in Jerusalem,
and we’ve pretty much scoured our closets for red clothing and read the
recollection of that event in Acts’ second chapter every Pentecost since.
Speaking of the Holy Spirit is not so simple. We should
probably start with seeing the person of the Spirit in the life of the
Trinity. The Holy Spirit is the bond of
love between the Father and the Son. As
God the Father, who is love, loves the Son, who is love, that medium of that
love is the Holy Spirit, who is also love.
Think about it. The Father
doesn’t send his Son a telegram saying “I love you” in Morse code. And Jesus, although of a younger, hipper,
generation, doesn’t text back with a kissy-face emoji. Only a medium that is also God is capable of
carrying the depth of the Father’s love to his Son and the Son’s love back to
the Father. The Father’s love is the
outpouring of his entire being, the self-giving of the core of who he is, the
true emptying of himself and his divine nature to his beloved Son. The Holy Spirit embodies that loving gift of
the Father’s own self to the Son, who returns with the same gift back to his
Father. The primary role of the Spirit
is this eternal outpouring of the loving essence of the Father and Son back and
forth to each other in their divine Trinitarian life. We glimpse one instance of this important
activity in a way we can comprehend at Jesus’ baptism, when the Spirit descends
upon him as a dove and we hear the Father’s voice.
The Holy Spirit’s second great mission is bringing that same
love from the heart of Jesus to us. The
Spirit of God brings us into a relationship with God by allowing God the Holy
Spirit to take up residence in our hearts.
We are saved and redeemed and assured of resurrection because we are no
longer merely mortal beings. We are
children of God who have been united to Jesus Christ through the outpouring of
same Holy Spirit that unites God the Father and God the Son. As the Spirit fills us, we become part of the
eternal divine life of God that exists in the unity and love of the Father and
the Son from the beginning and lasts unto ages of ages.
As the Holy Spirit dwells in us and we receive the full love
of God, at least two practical results happen to us as individuals. The first is prayer and the second is
conviction of sin.
Paul writes in Romans that when we cry “Abba! Father!” that
the Holy Spirit is the one crying out with our spirit. Later he writes that when we are weak, the
Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. Part of what Paul is talking about is that
the Holy Spirit within us connects us to God in prayer at a deeper level than
anything we have on our own. The Holy
Spirit within us is the gift of God’s love and life in our hearts and souls,
and we can reach back to God in prayer with that divine life and love through
the Holy Spirit. If talking to God without
the Holy Spirit is trying to get a satellite connection into heaven on an old
cell phone on a cloudy day, allowing the Holy Spirit to pray for us and lead us
in prayer is stepping on the transporter pad and beaming right up into the
throne room of God to let the Father give us a big hug and have a cup of coffee
with Jesus. Maybe there is a reason in
the old Star Trek episodes that Scotty always wore a Pentecost red shirt? Whenever people describe experiences of the
Holy Spirit, they almost always describe an incredible joy and peace that comes
in a more intimate prayer life. Through
the Holy Spirit, they come to know themselves as God’s children, and feel free
to worship God and to ask God for help in a richer way. Just to be clear, people have come to know
the Holy Spirit’s presence both with and without what we might call
“charismatic” or Pentecostal” experiences.
The Spirit works with us in various ways.
Besides prayer, another important individual consequence of
the Holy Spirit coming within us is the conviction of sin. God and sin don’t really get along. Sin is rejecting God and doing things that
would hurt ourselves or others instead of growing in love for God, our neighbor
and ourselves. One component of sin is
telling God that we really don’t want him there. The Holy Spirit is courteous and
gracious. The Spirit doesn’t break into
our hearts, tie up our wills and make us automatons for Jesus. The Spirit enters our lives as far as we want
God to come in, and will keep some distance when we want to kick God out. (Although
even then, God’s love is such that he never really leaves us, but we may force
him to step back enough for us to learn the hard way how much we really want
him in.) As the Holy Spirit enters our
hearts and we begin to experience a deeper intimacy with God, the parts of our
lives where that intimacy is absent become clearer to us. We come to see how sinful behaviors that we
always justified are really destructive.
The places in our lives where we are angry or jealous or resentful or
afraid become clearer. We start to see
our selfish decisions and our bad habits for what they are. And we realize that the Holy Spirit can’t
come into those parts of our lives until are willing to repent and change. Even if we can’t overcome certain things on
our own, we have to at least invite God into them and want to change as God
helps us.
To use a Northwestern Pennsylvania analogy: Imagine walking
around on a spiritual level in the middle of winter. The parts of our lives that good are hovering
about thirty degrees, and the bad parts are in the low twenties. There is a difference, but it’s pretty hard
to feel. Then the fire of the Spirit
comes into our hearts and every part of our life that is open to God has been
heated up to a sunny seventy-eight degrees, with adequate shade and
lemonade. We experience a comfort, a joy
and a peace we didn’t know before. But
then we run into the people we really hate, or we hit the gossip circle, or we
see the opportunity for workplace dishonesty.
All of the sudden we notice our lives are really cold and we know we
have to make a choice. We can invite the
fire into the frozen areas, or we can go back to living in the winter. But we can’t walk back and forth between them
all the time without getting a nasty and debilitating cold. That feeling is the conviction of the Holy
Spirit, and it is the primary path God gives us to whole and holy life.
To recap so far: The
Holy Spirit is the divine love connects the Father and the Son in the life of
the Trinity. The Holy Spirit is also the
connection between Jesus Christ and those who believe in him. The Holy Spirit in us that connects us to the
life of God helps us to pray and also convicts us of sin.
The Holy Spirit has another significant mission, which is to
connect members of Christ’s body with each other. This role isn’t surprising if we think about
it. The Spirit enables us to pour out to
each other the love that we have received from Christ and that he received from
his Father. Our scripture readings today
give us different examples of how the Spirit works to bring us together into
one Body of Christ.
In the reading from Acts, the Holy Spirit gives the gift of
tongues to the disciples, and in this instance tongues means the ability to
speak in a language you don’t understand to other people who do understand
it. Jesus’ Galilean disciples spoke
Aramaic and probably some Greek were suddenly speaking to Parthians, Medes,
Elamites, Egyptians, Arabs, Cretans and all sorts of other folks in their
native languages. The significant human
division of language that goes back to the tower of Babel was overcome by the
Holy Spirit. People speaking different
languages needed to hear the gospel, so the Holy Spirit made it happen, and
later that day three thousand were baptized.
This kind of speaking in tongues is still known to happen today, but
often the Holy Spirit works through Bible translators and missionaries to share
the gospel with previously unreached people groups in addition to what we might
consider more miraculous communication.
In the Gospel, Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit onto his
disciples and says that they have the power to forgive sins. Perhaps no work of the Spirit can bring
people together as profoundly as reconciliation. To reunite us one with another and to bring
all of us back to God, the Holy Spirit empowers us to tear down the walls
between us that sin constructed. The love
of God that the Holy Spirit has brought into our hearts allows us to love
another enough to forgive them. We can
love them more than any pain they have caused us and forgive what they have
done to us. We can also love them enough
to want them forgiven and recognize how much more God must want them forgiven,
and forgive what they have done to God.
In that act of forgiving, we also free ourselves of the need to judge
them further. We offer them the gift of
the Holy Spirit in their lives that will convict them whatever sins they need
still to be convicted of.
Then in First Corinthians, we hear about the gifts of the
Holy Spirit given for the common good.
The Holy Spirit recognizes all the different gifts and services and
activities necessary to allow a community to function. So the Spirit gives us all the opportunity to
express our love for our brothers and sisters in ways that are authentic to who
we are, that give us great joy and fulfillment in undertaking them, and that build
up the body of Christ. Some are
apostles, some are prophets, some are evangelists. Some have gifts of healing
or teaching or pastoring. Some have
gifts of music or dance or art. Some
have gifts of administration or of generous giving. Scripture doesn’t provide a definitive list
of all the gifts of the Spirit, but we are instructed to recognize that all of
them are important, and whatever gifts we have are to be used to build up the
whole Body of Christ. Our spiritual
gifts are one manifestation of the love of God given to us through the Holy
Spirit to share with our brothers and sisters.
If anyone wants to find out more about their spiritual gifts and how to
develop them we do have some excellent resources, so please let me know.
Pentecost is sometimes called the birthday of the
Church. On Pentecost, the Holy Spirit
flowed out from the center of life in the Trinity to reach the adopted children
of God through Christ Jesus. The Spirit
brings us into the deep intimacy of God in prayer and helps us overcome our
sins, while allowing us to reach out to one another with God’s love in a wide
variety of ways to build up the entire Body of Christ. As we
are filled to overflowing with the love of God by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit
will lead us to do some really amazing things.
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