Sermon Manuscript052707
Sermon Worksheet & Manuscript
Robert L. Hutcherson, Jr.
Quinn Chapel A.M.E. Church
Sermon Preparation/Delivery
Acts 2: 1-21
“Let the Holy Spirit Prevail!!”
The Rev. Karla J. Cooper, Pastor
May 27, 2007
”Pentecost Sunday”
Sermon Worksheet & Manuscript
TEXT
When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. 2 And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. 3 Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. 4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. 6 And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. 7 Amazed and astonished, they asked, "Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? 8 And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? 9 Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10 Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, 11 Cretans and Arabs — in our own languages we hear them speaking about God's deeds of power." 12 All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, "What does this mean?" 13 But others sneered and said, "They are filled with new wine." But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, "Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. 15 Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o'clock in the morning. 16 No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:
In the last days it will be, God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams.
Even upon my slaves, both men and women,
in those days I will pour out my Spirit;
and they shall prophesy.
19 And I will show portents in the heaven above
and signs on the earth below,
blood, and fire, and smoky mist.
20 The sun shall be turned to darkness
and the moon to blood,
before the coming of the Lord's great and glorious day.
21 Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.'
BODY
There is a "human spirit." We speak of the human spirit as that power within humanity. We say that the human spirit is "indomitable." When the track star stumbled in the marathon, but recovered, got up, picked up the baton and finished the race, and the sports commentator said, "That woman has great spirit," he was speaking of the human spirit. When writer William Faulkner received the Nobel Prize in Stockholm, he gave a speech saying, "I believe in man. I believe that man will triumph, despite everything." Faulkner believed in the ultimate victory of the human spirit. And yet, at times the same human spirit which, in times of difficulty, is able to take a deep breath, to clench its fist and move forward is also the spirit which clenches its fist in rage at God, in defiance and rebellion against the Creator. I find it ironic that the human spirit can be at the same time the source of some of our greatest achievements, and the source of some of our greatest grief.
But today we focus upon the Holy Spirit. From our perspective, history is a documentary of interactions, conflicts, and cooperation between the human spirit and the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit and the human spirit have at times been at odds, at times they have danced together, encouraged one another, at times they have been in combat with one another. Yet always, thank God, the Holy Spirit prevailed. Pentecost is a number of things: a great sign miracle demonstrating the exaltation of Christ, an equipment of the church for world-wide ministry, but it is also the inauguration of something new in the way in which God the Holy Spirit dwells in and works within believers. It is often said that while the Spirit was "with" believers in the Old Testament, he is now "in" believers, and this change from "with" to "in" is regarded as representing a deepening effect of the Spirit's presence. There is, as a result, a more intense, more personal, more spiritual religious life produced than was possible before. The law, it is often said, that was written on stone in the ancient era, is now to be written on the heart. Pentecost changes the QUALITY of the Spirit's ministry within the believer as well as the QUANTITY of that ministry within the world.
Communication, an ability to hear, to know what other people "are getting at" and "where they're coming from," has got to be one of the chief characteristics of the effective pastor. I want to be a good communicator, a skillful preacher. Yet before that, I learn that I must be a good listener. As someone has said, "A preacher must listen for six days a week -- listening to God and to the hopes, fears, and aspirations of the congregation -- for the right to speak one day a week." And in ALL things, the Holy Spirit MUST prevail!
The story we have read today, the story of Pentecost, is a story about hearing. Remember the Genesis story of the Tower of Babel, that time when the original "one language and few words" of humanity was disrupted forever by the profusion of languages and speech? Some believe that this Pentecost story is meant to signify a gracious reversal of Babel.
Here are all these people "Jews from every nation of the world." The whole world is there in one place, a babbling confusion of all sorts of languages. How on earth will they get together? How can they hope to hear one another? Then, there is a rush of wind, a shaking of the foundations, the Spirit descends, and they all hear, they understand. Do you believe it? Not, do you believe that such spiritual hearing happened back then, but do you believe it happens today? Is the Holy Spirit powerful enough to overcome those historic, deep, boundaries which frustrate our hearing? Can the Holy Spirit prevail?
Yes! says the church. The Holy Spirit gives us the ability to overcome our own isolation, our closed-eared deafness to one another. You know that moment of grace when, you are trying hard to express yourself, trying so to enable another person to hear, and the other person at last says, "Oh, I get it! What you are saying is....." and you say, "Yes! That's it!" It's a gracious moment, a gift, maybe even a miracle.
We Christians believe that such gracious moments of hearing are the result, not of a large vocabulary, or a skillful negotiation of differences, but rather as a gift of the Holy Spirit set loose among us.
Look at us this morning. Sure, we have our differences. There are so many factors which divide, all of the factors which divide any gathering of human beings. Yet, in the great grace of God, we are all here together, we do hear. One of the reasons why people keep coming back to church is that they hear something here that cannot be heard elsewhere. Things are uttered here which are subtly, though forcefully suppressed elsewhere. That's the Spirit. And even with my poor, pitiful, developing preaching, sometimes you hear. You come to church and you hear, not my poor nasal-quality Midwestern muddled voice, but, despite everything, the voice of God. You come here to this church and boundaries are overcome, barriers are broken, and you hear. The church, says Acts 2, receives its birth in such miraculous overcoming of differences, in hearing. the church at its best—a caring church, a church where love is experienced. Jesus said that the world would know his disciples by their love for one another—and that was certainly true of the church on the Day of Pentecost. They ate together, sang together, and worshipped together. They even had their possessions in common. They drew their strength from their powerful sense of unity. Barriers were broken. The Holy Spirit prevailed.
On Pentecost, we celebrate the triumph of the Spirit. Over all of our differences, even the difference of our nationalities and our divisive languages (what divides us more deeply than language and nationality?), of class, of race, of gender, at the Spirit's descent, over all these differences, those differences were overcome. Differences were destroyed. The Holy Spirit prevailed.
Pentecost was a festival whose name comes from the Greek word for "50" because this feast occurred fifty days after passover. It was the Old Testament's Feast of Weeks, a late Spring Jewish harvest festival which took place not long after the resurrection of Jesus. Jesus had been raised. The disciples had seen him, resurrected and returned to them. Yet now he had ascended and left them. He told them to wait in Jerusalem until he would send them his Spirit to be with them. They waited. Was Easter something which had happened to Jesus, but not to them? Were they now in a position where they would be forced to take a deep breath, to clench their fists and move forward with a positive attitude, despite the absence of Jesus? Many of them felt doubt and despair. Fear. Yet on Pentecost, there was a rush of mighty wind (we remember that the Greek word pneuma can be translated either spirit or wind), fire (Remember John the Baptist's prophecy of Christ's baptizing his disciples with the spirit and with fire (the fire an emblem of both cleansing and judgment), tongues of fire. The once disheartened disciples moved out, prodded, enabled by the Holy Spirit which gave that which the human spirit could not. The church was conceived. The Holy Spirit prevailed.
And who composed this church? Jews, of course. Those were the only ones gathered at Pentecost. Pentecost was a Jewish festival. The promises of God were clearly promises just for Israel. And yet, not long after the story of Pentecost in Acts 2, there are other stories. Peter has a vision, a vision which we studied just a while ago. In that vision a great sheet was lowered with all kinds of animals. "Don't call anything I create unclean," God’s voice had said. Peter came to see that the vision was not about unclean food but about "unclean" people. He met the gentile Cornelius and baptized him. The church could have become a sect within Judaism, a gathering place for disgruntled Israelites alone. But no, the promise of God was sent even to the outsiders, to the gentiles. The church was expanded. The Holy Spirit prevailed.
Fifteen hundred years later, the church which began at Pentecost languished. There was widespread corruption, abuse of power by the church. The church had become wealthy, complacent. Would the movement begun at Pentecost go the way of so many other organizations that mature and die? From Rotterdam Erasmus wrote his satirical, passionate, reasoned criticism. An Augustinian monk in Germany, Martin Luther, attacked, called a church back to its biblical roots. You know the rest of the story: The church was reformed. The Holy Spirit prevailed.
Eighteenth Century England was going through the trauma of urbanization and the first industrial revolution. Alcoholism was a plague upon the land. Poverty degraded the lives of millions. The church seemed far removed from these tragedies. Remote, privileged, cold. A priest in the Church of England named John Wesley felt his heart "strangely warmed." He began a dramatic revival which swept through England and transformed the hearts and minds of millions. The Wesleyan revival showed the resilience of the church, yes. It also showed something else. What had strangely warmed Wesley's heart? The church was renewed. The Holy Spirit prevailed.
Early Twentieth Century America was not that different from Eighteenth Century England. The young country's burgeoning cities where characterized by wretched tenements where recently arrived immigrants huddled. There was great poverty and despair. A young man named Frank Mason North was led into the worst of the poverty, an area of New York known as "Hell's Kitchen." There he worked among the poor, devising new structures for the uplift of the poor, giving them hope. He wrote one of our favorite hymns in this setting -- "Where Cross the Crowded Ways of Life." Again, despite all, the Holy Spirit prevailed.
Women, once key leaders of the church, if the New Testament be believed, had been pushed aside as the church fell into the patterns and mores of the surrounding culture. There were exceptions but mostly the gifts of women for leadership in ministry were ignored or repudiated. Finally, in our own century, the church awoke to the tragedy of its past practices. The gifts of women were affirmed. Our mainline Protestant churches began ordaining women and thousands flocked to our seminaries and into the pulpits of our churches. A sign that the church was finally catching up with the times? An idea "whose time had come?" Simply this: The church was restored. The Holy Spirit prevailed.
We therefore do not lose hope. We therefore are kept on tiptoe, expectant, eager, sometimes even nervous! For the Holy Spirit which gave birth to our church continues to prod, cajole, and call our church forward. In our church, in our own congregation, time and again, when we have been cold of heart, slow to move, timid and cowering, the Holy Spirit has prevailed. Over our boundaries, leaping over our walls, throbbing, intruding, calling forth, the Holy Spirit prevailed. Just when we get all settled down, comfortable with present arrangements, safe in our status quo, our pews bolted securely to the floor, all fixed and immobile, there comes a rush of wind, or a still small voice, a breath of fresh air, tongues of fire and.....The church revives. The Holy Spirit prevails!
In your own life, in those moments when all seems lost, when there is no way out, no way forward and yet you have been surprised when a door was opened, a way when there was no way, the Holy Spirit has prevailed.
As we look around us, we see people searching for lost values, for real meaning in life, and for hope. We know where it is to be found, Do we want to just watch them searching and never tell them where to find that what they are so desperately looking for? We must not, we can not, keep silent. Leighton Ford puts it like this: “There are too many churches with impeccable credentials for orthodox theology whose outreach is almost nonexistent. They are sound, but they are sound asleep . . . It is far too easy for the Church to become a sort of religious clique where Christians retreat from the world,” There is a legend that at the entrance to Heaven, two questions will be asked of everyone who comes seeking admittance. The first question is this: “Did you come alone?” And if—tragically—your answer is “Yes,” the second question follows. “How could you?”
The miracle of Pentecost, the gift of Spirit-induced hearing and communication continues, right here
PRAYER:
Come, Holy Spirit. Come with wind and fire. Shake us to our foundations. Breathe upon us.
You know us, how well we love the predictable, the secure, and the stable. You know how we curl up in the comfort of conventional. You know us. We are always attempting to turn church into a merely human fellowship. We are quite content with present arrangements. We die.
Yet we know that without your life-giving breath, we are nothing. Without some power, greater than our own, we are powerless in the face of death, prejudice, the walls which divide, words which hurt, diseases which will not be cured, and problems which seem insoluble.
Come, Holy Spirit. Come with wind and fire. Shake us to our foundations. Breathe upon us. Amen.
CHILDREN’S LESSON
Order of Worship
Sunday May 27th, 2007
11:00 A.M.
Opening Hymn……………………” God of Grace and God of Glory”, Hymn 62
Doxology………………………………………………..All
Call to Worship……………………………….Bro. Robert Hutcherson
Hymn…………………………………“Sing Them Over Again To Me”, Hymn 207
Prayer…………………………………………..Bro. Robert Hutcherson
Prayer Response………………………………….Give Us This Day”
Scripture Reading……………………………..Bro. Robert Hutcherson
Decalogue………………………………………Bro. Robert Hutcherson
Gloria Patri………………………………………….Congregation
Sermon…………………………………………Bro. Robert Hutcherson
Invitation to Christian Discipleship..”The Blood That Jesus Shed For Me”, Hymn 137
Altar Call/Offertory………………………………………All
Offertory Response……………………………”All Things Come Of Thee”
Affirmation of Faith…………………………………Congregation
Benediction……………………………………..Bro. Robert Hutcherson