“The Wind Blows Where It Wills” (Acts 2:1-4)

 

It’s probably been a long time since you were in a room with a hundred and twenty people. But I want you to do your best to imagine it anyway. You might even need to close your eyes for a moment—as long as you promise not to fall asleep!

The scene I want you to form in your minds is, of course, the upper room in Jerusalem. There Jesus’ followers had been gathering ever since the day he had been taken up into heaven. You may recall that he had left them with the command to wait for the gift the Father had promised, when the Holy Spirit would come upon them.

Luke tells us that they had faithfully followed Jesus’ instruction, joining together constantly in prayer. Ten days had now elapsed. It was the festival of Pentecost, seven weeks after the celebration of Passover. And next to Passover it was the biggest holiday of the year, marking the beginning of the barley harvest. You might think of it as a little bit like Thanksgiving, with people travelling from all over the empire to celebrate.

The big difference was, though, that instead of going back to their family homes, everybody came to Jerusalem. So the city was chock-a-block with people. And as a result the upper room must have seemed like something of an oasis—even with a hundred and twenty people packed into it!

Then something strange began to happen. Suddenly from out of nowhere the quiet murmur of prayer was overwhelmed by the roar of a violent wind. We’re not talking about a gentle spring breeze here or even a howling gale. Think Dorian. Think Juan. Now start multiplying. This was a wind that tumbles down trees. This was a wind that churns up waves that tower over the masts of ships. And Luke tells us that the roar of it filled every corner of the house where the hundred and twenty were assembled.

What could it all mean? I can only imagine that those first believers were utterly mystified. I know if I had been there I would have been shaking right to the marrow of my bones!

At the beginning of creation (Genesis 1:2)

But let’s stand back for a moment and from the safe distance of nearly two thousand years and let’s try to gain an understanding of what was happening on that Pentecost morning. Because what those first believers were experiencing was in fact just part of a much larger story. So over the next few minutes I want us to try to capture a view of that broader picture—and that will begin by going all the way back to the opening verses of the Bible.

There we are confronted by a remarkable picture. It is one that our human minds really aren’t capable of conceiving: absolute nothingness. The author of these verses uses the words “formless and void”—utter, impenetrable darkness. Yet over it all we find the Spirit of God. The words in Hebrew are Ruach Elohim.

Now that word ruach can mean not only “spirit”, but also “breath” or “wind”. So it is that one translation of this verse runs, “The wind of God swept over the face of the waters.”

Now if you’re a gardener like me, wind is not always a welcome phenomenon. In fact, it can be downright annoying. It’s the wind that blows the snow into three-foot drifts that I have to plow to get my car onto the street in the winter. It’s the wind that blows down the leaves from the trees in the fall and playfully scatters them all over the lawn so that I have to spend hours raking them up.

But the wind of God—Ruach Elohim—is just the opposite. As the ruach sweeps powerfully over the waters, order appears out of chaos. From the swirling formless plasma there begin to appear earth and sky; land and seas; trees and plants; sun, moon and stars; fish and birds and land animals. Then finally, bearing God’s own image, human beings. And like an artist standing back and looking at his work, the Bible tells us that “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good”.

So it is that a primary work of the Holy Spirit is to bring order out of chaos, beauty out of confusion. And that was exactly what was happening in the upper room on the Day of Pentecost.

Just try to put yourself into the minds of the disciples for a moment. Their lives had been a roller coaster. Just eight weeks before, they had been surrounded by a cheering crowd waving palm branches and shouting “Hosanna to the king!” as they made their way into Jerusalem. Five days later they had stood by helpless as they watched the one they had come to believe was their saviour hang dying on a cross as a convicted criminal. Then on the third day after that they had had to get their minds around the fact that the same man they had seen put to death was alive. And yet, while little doubt may have remained on one level, what were they to make of it? What did it all mean?

Enter the Holy Spirit, to bring order out of chaos, to make sense out of what in the eyes of the world would have been (and for many still is!) nonsense.

On the shore of the Red Sea (Exodus 14:10-22)

On to another scene now, this time with the Hebrew people on the banks of the Red Sea. It had been a dramatic time for them. They had lived through the long series of plagues that had afflicted the kingdom of Egypt. And then the worst had struck, taking in its wake the firstborn son in every Egyptian family. But it was this final tragedy that had led to the fulfilment of what had seemed an impossible dream. It was what allowed them to escape from their life of slavery in Egypt and find a land that they could call their own.

They had set up camp near the shore of the Red Sea, when word came to them that the Egyptian army was just over the horizon. Needless to say, they were panic-stricken. “What have you done to us?” they shouted at Moses. “Better to have been slaves than to be slaughtered like animals!” As the sun set, a powerful wind began to blow from the east. It blew all night, so that when daylight returned, the sea had dried up and the Hebrews were able to cross over into safety. As we all know, the Egyptian armies were not as lucky. Their horses and chariots bogged down in the soft ground and before they could escape, the sea had rushed back into its place.

And here we have a picture of a second work of the Holy Spirit: to bring hope into an atmosphere of despair, victory in the face of defeat. That too must have been the experience of Jesus’ followers in the upper room. Yes, they knew that Jesus had been raised from the dead. But realistically what was going to happen to them? Would they remain a tiny cluster of devotees who clung together around some fond memories? It wouldn’t surprise me to find that they were still locking the doors for fear of being found out by the authorities.

But now there was no longer any need for fear (or indeed any possibility of secrecy), as the Holy Spirit caused the sound of their joy-filled praises to flood out onto the street below.

In the Valley of Dry Bones (Ezekiel 37:1-14)

There is a third scene that I want to share, that underlies the events of Pentecost. It comes in what to me is one of the most arresting passages in all of Scripture—in a vision that God gave to the prophet Ezekiel.

Ezekiel tells us that he is led by the Spirit of the Lord (and once again it is that same word, ruach—breath, wind) to find himself standing in the middle of a valley—a valley full of bones. Countless numbers of parched and whitened bones surround him in every direction that he cares to look. As he gazes around at this scene of desolation, God puts the question to him, “Can these bones live?” Then God instructs him to command the bones, “Dry bones, this is what the Sovereign Lord says… ‘I will make breath enter you (and here again it is that same word, ruach), and you will come to life…’ ”

Hardly have the words left Ezekiel’s mouth than he begins to hear a rattling sound as the bones come together. Soon they are being covered with tendons and flesh and skin. But Ezekiel observes that there was no breath, no ruach, in them. Again God tells Ezekiel to prophesy, “Come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they may live.” As he does so, they raise themselves to their feet. And God gives Ezekiel the promise, “I will put my Spirit in you and you will live…”

Thus we see a third work of the Holy Spirit: to bring life where there is death. History tells us that, of the eleven apostles in that upper room, all but one would suffer a martyr’s death. But they would go to their deaths in the firm conviction that there was nothing that could separate them from God’s love in Christ. In the words of their future co-worker Paul, “He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you.” (Romans 8:11)

As a result, they would go to their deaths in the comfort of the Spirit-implanted conviction that nothing could separate them from Jesus’ love. In Eugene Peterson’s rendering of Paul’s words, “The Spirit of God whets our appetite by giving us a taste of what’s ahead. He puts a little of heaven in our hearts so that we’ll never settle for less” (2 Corinthians 5:5).

One night in Jerusalem (John 3:1-8)

Let’s shift now to one further scene. It’s a starry night in Jerusalem. Two figures can be seen in deep discussion. “Rabbi,” says one, “we know that you are a teacher who has come from God…” To which he receives the enigmatic reply, “No one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.”

“But how is this possible?” Nicodemus asks. “How can someone be born when they are old?” And Jesus replies, “The wind blows where it wills. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

On this festival of Pentecost we remind ourselves that the Holy Spirit continues at work today—in the midst of a confused and increasingly confusing world, in the midst of military wars and culture wars, in the midst of a growing environmental crisis, in the midst of a global pandemic—to bring the assurance that there is a God who reigns over all and whose good and perfect purposes will come to fruition—and that Jesus Christ has won the victory over sin and evil and death.

But it remains to you and to me to catch the wind—to allow God’s Holy Spirit to blow in us and through us. It will be unsettling. And no doubt he will rearrange your life a little. Perhaps more than a little! But the adventure will be worth it…

“The Real Miracle of Pentecost” (Acts 2:42-47)

I wonder how many people had their TV sets switched on yesterday morning at 5 o’clock. That’s when the CBC coverage of the royal wedding began and for the next five hours I can only imagine that millions of viewers were glued to their screens, trying to catch a glimpse of this or that celebrity among the six hundred who were invited to the event.

Long before it took place, countless hours of television time had already gone into the anticipation of the wedding—and for the publicists it was all big money. While the costs of the wedding are estimated to top $36 million, it was expected to generate over $860 million in revenue. If it is anything to go by, memorabilia sales alone for the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton seven years ago amounted to more than $380 million.

By this time you may already have been asking yourself, “What is this preacher fellow getting at—and what does all of this business about royal weddings have to do with the Bible anyway?” Well, for Christians today is the anniversary of another big event, when three thousand souls were added to the fledgling group of Jesus’ followers who had come together that morning to pray.

Little could they have imagined when they gathered in the upper room that they would be swept off their feet (spiritually if not physically) by a “rushing mighty wind”, touched by fire, and speaking in languages never before heard from their lips! So completely strange was what happened to them that it is little wonder that it all began to attract a crowd of people who were no less amazed and perplexed than they were. “We hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!”

So today, while the rest of the world is recovering from the royal wedding or preparing for Game Five in the playoffs between Vegas and the Jets, we Christians quietly celebrate the Feast of Pentecost. And quite rightly our attention is fixed on the miraculous events that occurred that morning: the mysterious whistling of the wind, the flames of fire that divided and settled on each of the believers, and the praises of God in all the varied languages of the known world.

It was a remarkable event—and I don’t know how many times I have preached on it over the past forty-plus years. Yet this year as I began my preparations, it dawned upon me that my attention has always been focused on the events in the opening verses of Acts, chapter 2. At the same time it began to occur to me that maybe what Luke wrote in the closing verses of that same chapter has even more to teach us about the real meaning of Pentecost and about the work that the Holy Spirit yearns to do in you and in me. So allow me to read them to you.

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favour of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

Devotion

There are three aspects of this brief summary of the first days of the church I would like us to focus on. The first of them can be summarized by the word “devotion”. Luke begins, “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.”

My Greek lexicon tells me that those words “devoted themselves” can be translated in a whole variety of ways: “persist in”, “attach oneself to”, “be faithful to”, “be busily engaged in”, “hold fast to”, “persevere in”, “spend much time in”. By now probably you get the idea. Those first believers were not prepared to allow anything to stand in the way of learning from the apostles or from coming together regularly for fellowship, worship and prayer.

Early in my own walk with Christ many years ago, my pastor encouraged me to begin memorizing Scripture. The first verses I ever committed to memory were Psalm 119:9 and 11, and I quote them as I learned them in the old King James Version:

Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?
By taking heed thereto according to thy word…
Thy word have I hid in mine heart,
that I might not sin against thee.

It seems to me that those early believers did exactly what Psalm 119 counsels us to do: they were taking God’s word to heart with an unshakeable commitment to the apostles’ teaching. Now of course they had no New Testament and they wouldn’t for a couple of generations. But they had the apostles themselves and they spent time learning from them, drinking in their words—and we’re not just talking about a weekly twenty-minute sermon or even a forty-minute one. Acts 20 tells us of an evening when the apostle Paul went on talking till midnight—to the point where one young man drifted into sleep and fell out the window!

But the point was that they could never hear enough. Like the two companions who met with Jesus along the road to Emmaus on that first resurrection day, I can only imagine that their hearts burned within them as they learned from the apostles and opened the Scriptures together.

Some years ago we had the privilege of hosting Ernest Gordon, who had been held captive in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Burma along what was known as the railway of death. Although he was not a believer at the time, he and some of his men began reading the New Testament together. It did not take long before they found that they could not put it down, for they had the amazing experience that the same Jesus whom they found on its pages was there among them.

Yet much of this seems so far from the experience of the church in our part of the world today. A recent study revealed that only forty-five percent of those who regularly attend church read the Bible more than once a week. Almost twenty percent say they never read the Bible—and that is about the same percentage as those who read it on a daily basis. [1] That seems a far cry from our early forebears who lived in the shadow of Pentecost, who could not get enough the apostles’ teaching. Would that the Holy Spirit would stir the same thirst in us today!

Awe

Those first believers showed a devotion to the apostles’ teaching. But Luke also tells us in verse 43 that “everyone was filled with awe”. Again, if you read that verse in the old King James Version, it would sound like this: “And fear came upon every soul.” The word in the original in fact is phobos. We find it in words like “claustrophobia”, the fear of small spaces, “acrophobia”, the fear of heights, and “arachnophobia”, the fear of spiders.

There was a German philosopher of a century ago called Rudolf Otto, who came up with the phrase mysterium tremendum—the sense of something so mysterious that it causes you to tremble. This, he said, is what happens to us when we come into the presence of the living God.

We see it in Moses as he tended his flocks in the wilderness and approached that strange bush that burned but was not consumed. The book of Exodus tells us that when Moses began to realize in whose presence he stood, “he hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God” (Exodus 3:6). Or think of Isaiah in the temple, as he gazed at the six-winged seraphs and heard their cry, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty…” and felt the stone floor shuddering beneath him. “Woe to me!” was all he could think to utter, “For I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty” (Isaiah 6:3-4).

Or we can turn to the New Testament, to the story of the centurion who came to Jesus on behalf of his servant. “Lord,” he said to him, “I do not deserve you to come under my roof…” (Matthew 8:5-9) Think too of the occasion when Peter and his companions had just hauled in an enormous load of fish because Jesus had told them to let down their nets in spite of there being no fish. He fell down before Jesus and wailed, “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” (Luke 5:1-10)

Our forebears in the faith had that same sense of awe as they gathered to learn from the apostles, to break bread and to pray together. The letter to Hebrews tells us,

You have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the Judge of all, to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. (Hebrews 12:22-24)

How we need to ask God to inspire in us that same sense of awe—each time we gather to take time to come before him consciously and deliberately and ask him to open our hearts afresh to the unfathomable mystery of his love and power. I have no doubt that we would know more of the Holy Spirit’s presence if we did.

Community

A devotion to the apostles’ teaching, awe in the presence of the living God—and a third characteristic of those first Christians I would like to emphasize comes in a word for which there is really no adequate English equivalent. It is the word koinonia. Most often it is rendered “fellowship” as we see it in this morning’s passage. But if you think of fellowship (as I suspect most of us do) as what happens over a cup of coffee after the worship service, then we have fallen woefully short of what the New Testament means when it uses the word koinonia.

What it really means is having something in common on a profound level—and Luke gives us a picture of how that works out in practical terms in those last verses of Acts 2. Let me read them to you once again:

All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts…

Now for us who have been immersed from infancy in the independent-minded, freedom-loving principles western society, that is a strange and even frightening picture. It may relieve you to know I am not advocating that we seek to replicate detail for detail all the practices of the early church.

What I am saying is that there was a genuine sense of caring and sharing among those first believers that you would not have found outside the church. I remember some years ago a pastor friend telling me of a member of his church who was part of a small group that met for Bible study and prayer. The man happened to work for a tobacco company. Over time he became convinced that as a Christian he could not in good conscience continue to do this and he shared it with the group. To his surprise, they all agreed that if he felt that this was the direction in which God was leading him, they would give him any financial support he might need in order to make the change—and they ended up caring for him and his family for the better part of a year until he found a new job.

Those people knew the meaning of the word koinonia. It was our Lord Jesus himself who said, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:35). And so I don’t believe it was by coincidence that Luke concludes the day of Pentecost with these words: “And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.”

As we look back on the mighty, rushing wind and on the tongues of fire that came upon those first believers, may we pray not for them to happen again, but for what they led to: to a wholehearted devotion to the apostles’ teaching, to a life-changing awe as we gather in the presence of the living God, and to a sense of community that is costly and real. In a word, may the Holy Spirit lead us to being the authentic body of Jesus in the world today.

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[1]     Ed Stetzer, “The Epidemic of Bible Illiteracy in Our Churches”, Christianity Today, July 2015

“Blown Away” (Acts 2:1-11)

 I’ve been scratching my brain to find a suitable metaphor to describe the experience of Jesus’ followers on the day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit first came upon them in power. One image that came to mind was the four Pevensie children in C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia—Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy—when they first entered that strange, enchanted land with its fauns and talking beavers, a witch who turns innocent creatures into stone and of course Aslan the great lion-saviour.

Moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, the second image that came to me (and maybe I am about to reveal things about me that you didn’t want to know!) was from the movie Ghostbusters. Do you remember the scenes where the cameras began to reveal strange things happening beneath the otherwise normal streets of New York City? Odd-coloured vapours arising from the drains, paving stones heaving, gargoyles on buildings starting to twitch…

In each case we are being introduced to a world beyond our own, to the notion that what we consider normal is only the tiniest fragment of a vast, hidden realm unperceived by our senses. For the Pevensie children it lay behind the doors of an ordinary wardrobe. For Dr Peter Venkman and his team of parapsychologists it was hidden in the recesses of a major metropolis.

For Jesus’ followers something of that wider world had been opened up to them as they followed him through the towns and villages of Galilee. There they witnessed things that they would never have thought possible: paralyzed people walking, blind people seeing again, lepers being cleansed, demons being cast out, the dead raised back to life again. To use Jesus’ own words, the kingdom of heaven was among them. And of course things had become stranger still in the days following Jesus’ crucifixion, as he appeared among them recognizably the same and yet somehow strangely different.

Up until now you might say they had just brushed with the kingdom of heaven. On Pentecost they were actually stepping into it themselves for the first time. “Suddenly,” as Luke describes it, “a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting.” Many of us are so accustomed to reading this passage at Pentecost that I wonder if we haven’t lost sight of what a terrifying event this must have been.

The sound of the wind that swept through the room was not like some gentle summer’s breeze. Nor was it even that of a strong wind in which you might be tempted to go out for a sail or fly a kite. No, it was “a violent wind”, a wind powerful enough to sweep you off your feet and blow down trees. In the words of Psalm 29, it was a wind that “twists the oaks and strips the forests bare”. Those of us who were here in Halifax for Hurricane Juan a dozen years ago would have an idea of what I mean. The word Luke uses to describe the forcefulness of that wind at Pentecost is found in only two other places in Scripture. We come across the first instance as Moses and the people of Israel stood on the banks of the Red Sea with all the might of Pharaoh’s vast army approaching fast behind them. We are told that Moses “stretched out his hand over the sea” and the Lord drove back the waters with a powerful east wind that turned the sea into dry land (Exodus 14:21). The second is when the psalmist speaks of the thick oaken beams of a ship being shattered like matchsticks by a violent wind (Psalm 48:7). Such was the roar that filled the whole house where the disciples were sitting at Pentecost. Those first followers of Jesus were literally being swept up into a whole new world.

New Language

Now one of the problems with wind is that it rearranges things. You’ve just raked up all the leaves from your lawn when a wind comes up and takes you back to square one. You’ve just neatly arranged all the papers on your desk, when someone opens a window and they’re all over the floor. So it is with the Holy Spirit. He has an annoying habit of rearranging our lives, jostling us out of our settled ways, challenging our neat, man-made categories. That was certainly the way it was with the disciples, as suddenly they found themselves praising God in languages they had never spoken before.

Of course what they didn’t know at that point that what was happening to them was not for their benefit but for that of the many pilgrims who were in Jerusalem for the festival. Those visitors began to hear the praises of God being proclaimed in their own individual languages—Parthians, Medes, Elamites and all the rest in that long list of unpronounceable nationalities. And it had them bewildered.

I had a small experience of that when I was rector at St Paul’s Church on the Grand Parade. During the weeks following Christmas we would read from the gospel in a different language each Sunday. The intention was to give us all a greater appreciation of the worldwide church. On one particular Sunday the reading happened to be in Mandarin. As it was being read a man entered the church having just arrived from China as a student. He had come just to take a peek inside an historic building and spoke almost no English. Yet there he was hearing his own language being spoken. Needless to say, it was a deeply moving experience for him and we saw him every week after that.

In the last church where I served, we had a member who had a Master’s degree in Teaching English as an Additional Language. She was keen to reach out to the many immigrants to Saint Paul from all over the world and so she trained some of the members so that we could offer English conversation sessions. In spite of every effort, I think that over a period of two years we had only one taker and we were a little disappointed. Then suddenly we were inundated with more than a hundred refugees from Burma, most of whom didn’t speak a word of English, but the Holy Spirit had made sure that we had our conversation partners in place.

One of the ongoing challenges for the church is to relate the good news of Jesus Christ in language that people can understand. It is a sad fact that the longer we are involved in the church the more comfortable we become with a language called “Christianese”. Words such as “sin”, “repentance”, “grace” and “Saviour” have rich meaning for us and I would not begin to suggest that we even think of discarding them. But they are at best meaningless to the average non-Christian and in some cases they are seriously negatively loaded. (When I was a child I used to think that the Salvation Army had its name because it picked up old discarded clothes and furniture and saved them. I had no idea that people could be saved too!) We need the fresh breath of the Holy Spirit to sweep us out of the language of the Christian ghetto to communicate the good news of Jesus in new ways that touch the minds and hearts and lives of those around us, that causes them to ask questions as the crowd did at Pentecost. “How is this happening?” “What does this mean?” “What shall we do?”

New People

The result of the Holy Spirit’s work on the day of Pentecost was that three thousand people were added to the little band of Christian believers in its first twenty-four hours. I can’t imagine the logistics involved in baptizing all those people! However, I know that growth on a similar scale continues in many parts of the world today. In the Middle East and North Africa there are reliable reports of thousands of Muslims turning to Christ, sometimes quietly and beneath the official radar, sometimes in mass baptisms of dozens, even hundreds, of people. An article a couple of years ago in the London Telegraph told the story of massive church growth in China. It included a calculation by Purdue University Sociology professor Fenggang Yang that by the year 2030 the Christian population of China will exceed 247 million, making it the largest Christian population in the world.[1]

I am sure we welcome such growth. At the same time growth also brings its challenges. Remember that wind of the Holy Spirit, stirring things up, moving them around, undoing our tidy little arrangements? It didn’t take long for that to happen among the Christian believers in Jerusalem. Just move a few pages along in Acts, to chapter 6, where Luke begins, “In those days when the number of believers rapidly multiplied…” It all sounds good. But then he goes on: “… there were rumblings of discontent.”[2] The problem centred on the Greek-speaking believers, who were complaining that their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food. A couple of chapters later we meet with Simon, who had been a practiser of sorcery and had the crazy notion that he could buy the Holy Spirit with money. In each of these cases (and there would be many more), the problem the disciples were facing was the challenge of growth, as new people came into the community and brought with them new backgrounds, new ideas, new issues, and new needs.

The New Testament bids us look forward to the day when people of every nation, tribe, people and language will stand around the throne of the Lamb crying aloud, “Salvation belongs to our God!” (Revelation 7:9-10) That is a picture of heaven, but from an earthly perspective things can look different. The church in Corinth included in its number women and men who came from backgrounds of sexual immorality, idolatry, adultery, thievery, crass materialism, alcoholism, backbiting and dodgy business practices.[3] But they were there because the Holy Spirit had brought them there. I imagine that the lives of the elders and deacons in that church would have been much quieter without them. As it was, however, it must have been something like a bronco ride. The wind of the Holy Spirit was blowing through them—and all they could do was to hold on for dear life and pray!

New Creation

As the Holy Spirit moves through us he will bring new people into our midst—and unless we are only prepared to accept clones of ourselves, that will bring its challenges. But the Spirit is equal to them and we must trust him to do his work.

There is a new movement that has been gaining strength in the church. It’s called “messy church”. I don’t know a lot about it, but I am attracted to the title. I well remember an elderly clergyman coming into my office and staring at my desk. “You know,” he said (and I’m sure you’ve heard this before), “a messy desk is the sign of a healthy mind.” I’m not sure that that is entirely true, but I took it as a compliment. At the heart of “messy church” is the notion that a church that is healthy and growing, a church where the Holy Spirit is blowing, will always be a little messy, a little rough around the edges, perhaps even a little unsettling at times. At the same time it will undoubtedly be an adventure. It will bring rich, deep and lasting relationships as we face life’s challenges together, as we don’t ignore the mess around us and within us and together allow the Holy Spirit to do his work.

All of this is so worth it, because it is part and parcel of participating in God’s new creation irrupting into the old. As in the opening chapter of Genesis, the Holy Spirit is hovering over the waters, bringing about a whole new order from the darkness and chaos that surround us. And you and I have the inestimable privilege, with Peter and James and Mary and Joanna and Andrew and Paul, with Augustine and John of the Cross and Theresa and all the countless saints down through the ages, with men and women and children in Burma and Argentina, Libya and Nigeria and some of the most unlikely places in the world today, of being participants in and witnesses to that new creation.

“Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting.” Are you and I willing to be swept off our feet by the Holy Spirit and blown into that adventure which is God’s new creation?

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[1]        Tom Phillips, “China on course to become 'world's most Christian nation' within 15 years”, The Telegraph, 19 April 2014. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/10776023/China-on-course-to-become-worlds-most-Christian-nation-within-15-years.html

[2]        New Living Translation

[3]        See 1 Corinthians 6:9-10

“Question Time” (Acts 2:6-12)

In many ways Pentecost is my favorite Sunday of the church year. I never tire of reading from that second chapter of Acts: of the sound of the mighty, rushing wind filling the whole house, of the cloven tongues of fire resting upon each of the disciples, of their suddenly speaking in other tongues “as the Spirit gave them utterance”. Then, just beneath them, on the other side of the window, were those devout Jews “from every nation under heaven”—men and women from all those strange, exotic-sounding places like Parthia, Media, Elam, Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia, Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt, Libya and Cyrene. It is an amazing story, and somehow it never loses its freshness for me. If anything, it becomes more fascinating with each passing year.

For the most part, our focus in the narrative tends to be on the experience of Peter and the other disciples in the upper room. After all, what happened to them was nothing short of spectacular. The wind, the fire, and not least the sudden ability to communicate in languages previously unknown to them, along with the transformation of Peter from a man who had been afraid to admit his allegiance to Jesus to a bold proclaimer of the gospel—all within a space of minutes—truly staggers the imagination.

It is natural that our attention should be drawn to what the Holy Spirit was doing inside the walls of the upper room Yet Luke, the author of the Acts of the Apostles, was well aware that the Spirit was very much at work in the people outside those walls as well. In fact, Luke uses no fewer than four different verbs to describe the impact that the events of Pentecost was having on them: “bewildered”, “amazed”, “astonished”, “perplexed”. Eugene Peterson catches it well in his translation in The Message: “… they were thunderstruck. They couldn’t for the life of them figure out what was going on… Their heads were spinning; they couldn’t make head or tail of any of it. They talked back and forth, confused: ‘What’s going on here?’ ”

Are not these Galileans?

In the midst of all their confusion we hear them asking three questions. You’ll find the first in verse 7: “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans?” Half a world away and twenty centuries later the implications of that question are lost on most of us. But the fact was that among the city sophisticates in Jerusalem Galileans were regarded as bumpkins. Galilee was a backwater, far from the beaten track. They didn’t even know how to speak properly. Remember how Peter gave himself away by his Galilean accent. Even the Galileans didn’t have a high opinion of themselves. And think of Nathaniel’s comment when he learned where Jesus was from. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” he asked.

Yet here were these rural people, totally unfamiliar with city ways, who knew nothing of art or culture, addressing them in their own languages, and without even a trace of an accent. This was to be their first lesson in the ways of the Holy Spirit.

In reality it should have been nothing new to those people. It was embedded in their heritage. Part of the Haggadah recited every year at Passover contains a confession from Deuteronomy 26:5, which runs thus: “A wandering Aramean was my father. And he went down into Egypt and sojourned there, few in number, and there he became a nation, great, mighty, and populous.” They would have been familiar also with the story of how David had been chosen as king: how Jesse had paraded seven of his sons before the prophet Samuel, yet it was none of them but David, the least of them, who was fit only to be a shepherd in the fields, whom God had called.

This is the story of the ways of God in the Bible again and again. He chooses the least fit, the least worthy, the least predictable, to carry forward his purposes in the world. The apostle Paul summed it up in his words to the Corinthians:

Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. (1 Corinthians 1:26-29)

Christian history ever since is peppered with women and men, some of them with very little education or advantage, some in spite of illness and disability, who have made a huge impact for Christ. We do the Holy Spirit a disfavor when we underestimate his power to take the most unlikely people as channels of his glory—and sometimes those unlikely people are you and I.

How is it that we hear?

The second question that we hear asked on that day of Pentecost is found in the next verse: “How is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?” It’s not my purpose to go into the mechanics of how the disciples found themselves speaking in languages they had never known. Scholars with far more learning than me have sought in various ways to explain it, but I believe it is best left a mystery. Let me just say that from what I can tell there were two miracles involved. The first had to do with the disciples speaking in other languages. The second had to do with the people actually hearing them, not just with their physical ears, but that the message penetrated deeper, into their hearts. Later on, at the conclusion of Peter’s sermon, Luke comments, “When they heard this, they were cut to the heart” (Acts 2:37).

Jesus talked about these two kinds of hearing repeatedly in the gospels. Think of his repeated refrain, “Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.” That is the whole point of the parable of the sower. He spread the seed on all kinds of ground. But it was only in the fertile soil that it was able to take root and grow and produce grain. It is the point of the story of the two sons, one of whom said yes to his father but didn’t bother to do what he was asked, the other of whom initially said no but went ahead and did it. It is the point of the two house builders, one of whom built his house on the sand, the other on bedrock.

All of this, I believe, is the work of the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit who prepares the soil to accept the seed so that it may sprout and grow. It is the Holy Spirit who gives us the will and the power not merely to say yes to God’s call on our lives, but to respond with action. It is the Holy Spirit who inspires and empowers us, to hear Jesus’ words with more than just our outward ears, but equally importantly to build our lives upon it.

I remember inviting a prominent and gifted preacher to preach in my previous parish. I will never forget how he began his sermon leaning over the pulpit and asking the congregation, “How many of you have ever heard a sermon?” “How many of you have ever heard a sermon?” he asked. “Now I know that most of you have been present for a sermon. But how many of you have actually heard a sermon?” To hear a sermon, to hear God’s word in whatever way it may come to us, requires the work of the Holy Spirit.

Each morning when I read the Bible, the chances are I will have forgotten what I have read by the time I sit down for breakfast. However, I pray that that may not be the case, that the Holy Spirit will empower me to hear what God is saying to me with my inward ears, to retain it, to allow it to sink into my heart and make a difference to who I am. “How is it that we hear?” the people asked. By the power of the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit alone who is able to take God’s word and make it live for us and in us.

What does this mean?

The third question that the people asked takes us a whole level deeper. We find it in verse 12: “What does this mean?” Looking back on my own years of Christian experience, not to mention the nearly twenty centuries of church history, I am tempted to answer them, “Little do you know!”

Little did they know what they were being swept up into. Little did they know that in less than a generation they would be part of a movement that was being felt right across the whole known world. Little did they know that the message they were hearing would reach out to lands of whose existence they were not even aware. Little did they know that there would be people still responding to and living out that message nearly two thousand years later.

All of this is hindsight on our part. They had no idea of the meaning of what was happening to them. How could they? Yet those words, “Little do you know,” can apply as easily to us today. When I look back at the changes that have occurred not only in my life and in the lives of those around me, but also in the wider church, I have to admit, “Little did I know.” Little did I know where the Holy Spirit would lead me in my Christian journey. (I can certainly tell you that Minnesota never occurred to me.) Little did I know that what used to be called “the mission field” would explode to the point where the majority of Christian believers now live in those places until so recently apparently untouched by the gospel.

More amazingly still, what those first believers witnessed, and what we are witnessing today is only what the Bible calls the first fruits of the new creation. It is the trailer in the movie theater, those brief two and a half minutes that give you little more than an inkling of what the full feature is going to be about.

What does all this mean? It means that God’s new creation has begun its invasion of the old. It means that the day is coming when not only we, but everything that is, will be made new by the power of the Holy Spirit. And that is something of which the human mind can hardly comprehend the tiniest fraction. As J.B. Phillips put it in his translation of Romans, “The whole creation is on tiptoe to see the wonderful sight of the children of God coming into their own… And the hope is that in the end the whole of created life will be rescued from the tyranny of change and decay, and have its share in that magnificent liberty which can only belong to the children of God!” (Romans 8:19,21)

That is something to get excited about. Pentecost is something to get excited about—but more importantly, may it lead us to seek and to know the Holy Spirit more fully in our lives today: to allow him to continue to surprise us, to let him speak God’s word to our hearts, and to make us agents and ambassadors of the glorious hope that awaits us.

Sermon – “Pour Out Your Spirit” (Acts 2:17; 2:4 & John 7:37,38)

If I were to have a favorite prayer in our Book of Common Prayer, I think it would have to be the one that follows a baptism. The candidates have just been baptized. The water is still trickling down their foreheads, when we pray, “Sustain them, O Lord, in your Holy Spirit. Give them an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere, a spirit to know and to love you, and”—here’s the bit I especially like—“the gift of joy and wonder in all your works.”

“The gift of joy and wonder in all your works…” Over a century ago G.K. Chesterton wrote about the wonder that characterizes childhood.

When we are very young children we do not need fairy tales: we only need tales. Mere life is interesting enough. A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door. Boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales—because they find them romantic. In fact, a baby is about the only person, I should think, to whom a modern realistic novel could be read without boring him.

He then went on to lament the tragedy of the loss of that sense of wonder that happens to all of us.

We have all read … the story of the man who has forgotten his name. This man walks about the streets and can see and appreciate everything; only he cannot remember who he is. Well, every man is that man in the story. Every man has forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star… We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.[1]

In his book Dangerous Wonder, Mike Yaconelli uttered a similar lament:

Most of us cannot say when it happened, we only know that it happened. When we became aware of the absence of God’s voice, there were a thousand deaths within us. Idealism and innocence died first. And across the scarred terrain of our souls, one could see the withered remains of dreams, spontaneity, poetry, passion, and ourselves—our real selves, the persons we were made to be.

What happened? What happened to our aliveness? …

The death of the soul is never quick. It is a slow dying, a succession of little deaths that continues until we wake up one day on the edge of God’s voice, on the fringe of God’s belovedness, beyond the adventure of God’s claim on our lives.[2]

Jesus’ followers lived at a time when a relationship with God had been reduced to a matter of following prescribed rules and regulations. The wonder of the Red Sea parting to allow their ancestors to cross or of the smoke and thunder atop Mount Sinai were but a shadowy memory. The same might easily have happened to Jesus’ followers as well. The feeding of the five thousand, the stilling of the storm on Lake Galilee, the healing of the demoniac at Gerasa and the hundred and one other staggering events that they had witnessed over the course of those three years—not to mention the resurrection itself—might easily have become just memories, were it not for one thing: Pentecost.

I can’t imagine that they had any idea what was happening to them at first: the roar of a violent windstorm filling the house; what seemed to be tongues of fire settling on each of them; and then, perhaps eeriest of all, speaking in languages that they had never known. I can only think that initially at least they were as mystified as the crowd that began to gather outside. “What is going on?”

Pouring

It was Peter who was the first to begin to figure it out: “This is what was spoken through the prophet Joel: ‘In the last days I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.’ ” Joel had not been the only one to prophesy what was happening. We read it in Isaiah and Ezekiel as well.

I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground; I will pour out my Spirit upon your descendants, and my blessing on your offspring. (Isaiah 44:3)

I will restore the fortunes of Jacob, and have mercy on the whole house of Israel… Then they shall know that I am the Lord their God … and I will never again hide my face from them, when I pour out my Spirit upon the house of Israel, says the Lord God. (Ezekiel 39:25, 28, 29)

I took a moment to look up the word “pour” in a thesaurus. Here are some of the synonyms I came up with: teem, drench, gush, stream, surge, cascade, spill. So when God pours out his Holy Spirit, it is not as though he does it with an eyedropper. What we are talking about is Niagara Falls.

Ezekiel gives us an amazing picture of this in the second-last chapter of his prophecy. He has a vision of himself standing at the entrance to the Temple. He looks down and at his feet he sees a tiny trickle of water seeping out from beneath the threshold. He walks a distance of five hundred yards and the water is now ankle-deep. Another five hundred and it is knee-deep. Another and it is up to his waist. Finally it is so deep and so wide that he cannot even swim across it. This is the water that brings freshness and life, healing and vitality to the world.[3]  

That is the way of the Holy Spirit. We’d be far more comfortable if we could have him in little doses. It would make life so much simpler—especially for us Episcopalians, who prefer our religion to be genteel, restrained. But that is not how God works. Our heavenly Father is lavish. He pours out his Holy Spirit on us. “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Romans 5:5). “This Spirit he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior” (Titus 3:7). It’s like drinking from a fire hose.

Filling

Luke tells us in verse 4 of this morning’s reading from Acts that the disciples were filled with the Holy Spirit. What does it mean to be filled with the Spirit? The first thing that comes to my mind is that the Holy Spirit wants all of us. We are so accustomed to compartmentalizing our lives. It could be into work and family and leisure activities—or the physical versus the intellectual versus the spiritual. Perhaps we have some other way of dividing things up. However we do it, the end result is more often than not the same. There is a spiritual component, or a God component, that frequently ends up occupying the tiniest portion of who we are.

But that is not how God sees us. God sees us as whole beings. He has created us in such a way that body, mind and spirit are inseparably and indivisibly intertwined. This is something that modern science is increasingly recognizing. We are indeed “fearfully and wonderfully made”. So it is that the Bible calls upon us to present our bodies as a living sacrifice to God. Why? Because this is our spiritual worship. What’s more, it calls us to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. The Holy Spirit yearns to fill all of us: body, mind and spirit.

Thus Paul prays for his fellow believers in Ephesus, that they “may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:18,19). Later in the same letter he tells them to “be filled with the Spirit, as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts, giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Ephesians 5:18-20).

Robert Boyd Munger wrote very helpfully about this in his little booklet, My Heart—Christ’s Home. It is about what it means to invite Jesus into our lives—not just to leave him in the entryway, but to invite him into the library: the books I read, the magazines I browse and perhaps nowadays the internet sites I visit. He then moves into the dining room, the place of my appetites and desires, and then the living room, the workroom, the rec room—and by now you get the picture. So it is with the Holy Spirit. He desires to fill every area of our lives with his life-giving, renewing presence. And in my experience, that is a life-long project.

Flowing

We have thought about God’s pouring out of the Holy Spirit into our lives and of our being filled with the Spirit. However, if you look at our Gospel reading, you will notice that Jesus speaks not about filling up but about flowing out. “Let any who are thirsty come to me,” Jesus said, “and let any who believe in me drink. As the Scripture has said, ‘Out of their hearts shall flow rivers of living water.’ ”

What Jesus is expressing here is a principle that is embedded deep within the Scriptures. That is that we are blessed in order that we may be a blessing to others. It was true of Abraham and his descendants in the Old Testament. Paul enunciates it in the New Testament when he writes about the gifts of the Holy Spirit. “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Corinthians 12:7). Jesus told his disciples that the Holy Spirit would come upon them so that they could be his witnesses to the ends of the earth.

God does not give us his Spirit so that we can enjoy some esoteric experience. He fills us with his Spirit in order that we may serve others. The Spirit flows into us in order that he may flow out from us. We are not meant to be bottles, but channels. Perhaps you are familiar with the parable of the Dead Sea:

Israel has two lakes. The one in the north is Lake Kinneret—the Sea of Galilee. Most of the water in Israel comes from this lake. As they did in New Testament times, people still catch fish there for a living, and its redbelly tilapia are considered a delicacy.

The second of Israel’s lakes is the Dead Sea and it is an area of desolation. Even though the fresh waters of the Jordan wind their way over 156 miles and down 700 feet into it from the Sea of Galilee, no plants grow along its banks and no fish swim in its salt-laden waters. The mineral content is so great that it burns the eyes and any open wound. After being in the water, bathers must wash to cleanse themselves from its residue.

Lake Galilee remains fresh and life-supporting because water flows both into and out of it. When water reaches the Dead Sea there is no way out except to evaporate. So too, God graciously fills us with his Holy Spirit in order that his blessings may flow through us and out to others, bringing life and peace, kindness and joy. There is no limit to the Holy Spirit’s supply. He will keep filling us and filling us and filling us.

May we know that filling today—and as we do may we see the blessings of the Holy Spirit spilling out into the lives of others as well as he moves us to love and to serve them in Jesus’ name.

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[1]     Orthodoxy, Ch. 4, “The Ethics of Elfland”, 52,53

[2]     Dangerous Wonder, 14,15

[3]     Ezekiel 47:1-12