Many of the sermons reflect, either implicitly or by direct reference, the time and place in which they were originally delivered. I have elected to include them without revision for specific recent events. Most dramatically, perhaps, the premise of the sermon titled “Human Fear and Divine Promise” has become tragically even more poignant. In all cases, I believe, history has only added to, rather than subtracted from, their pertinence. I encourage the reading of the lections listed for each sermon prior to reading the sermon itself.
In one way or another, all of the sermons in this collection offer testimony to the truth that Ordinary Time is a fruitful season for proclaiming and celebrating the extraordinary work of God in the person of the living Lord Jesus Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. May each of us rejoice constantly that God is never absent from the beloved creation, and that Christ is able to transform the mundane and the routine into the heaven-imbued and the exceptional, meaning that no circumstance is hopeless and no moment lies outside the divine timetable of salvation.
The Day of Pentecost
Spanish Springs Presbyterian Church, Sparks, Nevada
May 11, 2008
Acts 2:1–21
1 Corinthians 12:3b–13
John 20:19–23
“The Mission of Love”
For you and me, twenty centuries after the disciples “were all together in one place” (Acts 2:1b, NRSV), Pentecost is a date on a calendar, one that changes from year to year depending upon when Easter occurs. Indeed, when it happens to fall on the second Sunday of May, the religious holiday can seem quite secondary to the secular celebration of Mother’s Day, even in some churches. But long before Mother’s Day was invented, long before the affection that family members should have for one another was turned to profit, Pentecost was celebrated throughout the Christian community as the birthday of the church, dated from the bestowal of the Holy Spirit upon Christ’s followers.
Can you imagine the excitement of that Pentecost long ago, when, after waiting for they-knew-not-exactly-what, something totally unprecedented happened to the disciples who were gathered together? There was “a sound like the rush of a violent wind,” the book of Acts says, “and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability” (Acts 2:2–4, NRSV). But the experience was not to be a private affair, and it was not for personal gratification, nor was it meant to create a spiritual elitism. “Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each” (Acts 2:5–6, NRSV).
Here is a biblical story that Hollywood, to my knowledge, has never tackled. It’s just as well; perhaps we, each of us, should be allowed to picture it in our own imagination. It might just be too spectacular for the silver screen, even in this age of computer-generated special effects. It’s spectacular enough in the telling, and has sparked a lot of fantastic claims over the history of Christianity, not least of which is the whole matter of speaking in tongues. But it’s not at all about the disciples suddenly speaking an unknown super-spiritual language of heaven. These were words that people in other parts of the world used in common, everyday speech. What Acts is saying is that people who had come to Jerusalem from every corner of the earth for the feast of Pentecost heard and understood what the disciples had to say.
Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” (Acts 2:7–11, NRSV; emphasis here and in subsequent scripture quotations has been added)
Luke, whom we believe was the author of Acts, was clearly impressed with the supernatural aspect of tongues as of fire and the disciples speaking suddenly in foreign languages, and that scene grabs our attention, too. But we shouldn’t let our curiosity about the spectacular features of the story obscure the substance of what was going on: the disciples, only just recently fearful and disavowing any relationship to Jesus, timid and uncertain following the death of their Master, were now testifying to God’s deeds of power, and people representing every nation on earth were listening and hearing. Peter, the very one who had denied even knowing Jesus on the night of his arrest, suddenly became bold and articulate, and the others soon followed his lead. And the rest of the book of Acts shows how the proclamation of God’s deeds of power in Jesus Christ spread from Jerusalem through Judea and Syria and all the way to Rome.
But although this passage from Acts about the coming of the Holy Spirit is the story most of us think of, Luke’s account of the coming of the Spirit upon the disciples as Jesus had promised is not the only account of the coming of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament. What Luke interprets as having taken fifty days to happen after the resurrection, the Fourth Gospel interprets as having happened on the very night after Jesus’ tomb was discovered to be empty.
When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” (John 20:19–23, NRSV)
Hollywood hasn’t given us a movie version of that episode, either, maybe because the studios wouldn’t know what to make of it—John’s account of the gift of the Holy Spirit isn’t flashy enough, despite the implication that Jesus was able to walk through a locked door, just as he had been raised from a sealed tomb. But we don’t have to regard the different accounts as contradicting each other. It isn’t a matter of accepting one story and rejecting the other. As it so often does, John’s Gospel is more interpretive of events that Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell more journalistically. And it’s not just an issue of when it occurred. Where Luke, in the book of Acts, says that the foreigners heard from the disciples in their own language about God’s deeds of power, the first installment of the witness that the disciples were to make “in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8b, NRSV), John specifies that the Spirit-empowered mission of the disciples was the work of forgiving and retaining sins. And whereas, in Luke, the Spirit was something that Jesus had said he was going to send (and so it happens in Acts many days separate and apart from the presence of Christ, who has already ascended to heaven), in John, the granting of the Spirit is a personal delivery—as personal as Jesus’ own breath, breathed out upon the disciples as they have just verified that the resurrected Christ standing before them is the same person as the crucified Jesus who was buried in the tomb. John leaves no doubt that it is Jesus’ own Spirit that is being bestowed (the same word in Greek means both “spirit” and “breath”), and it is Jesus’ own ministry that the disciples will be carrying on. And it is inextricably related to Christ’s greeting and gift of peace.
The bestowal of the Holy Spirit, in John, is, as we noted, related to the forgiveness of sins: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained” (John 20:23, NRSV). The authority to forgive and retain sins is a power that troubles a good many Christians who are loathe to exercise what seems to be a very weighty responsibility; surely it should be up to God to forgive or
