The Spirit

Welcome

Are you a birthday person? As in, do you enjoy when your birthday is coming up? Do you declare a ‘birthday’ week or - even more audaciously - a ‘birthday month’? Or are you the person who dreads birthdays, who works hard to make sure nobody knows when your birthday is so it can go by unobserved?

It will likely not shock you to know that I am a birthday person. Not just mine - though I love celebrating mine. I love celebrating my friends’ birthdays. As we were approaching today, I paused to think about why. I think it’s because when we celebrate your birthday, we’re celebrating you - all your accomplishments and successes. All the you that makes you, you. We get to stop in the midst of our running and doing and making and earning and just shower you with love and appreciation.

My friend Kathy is pretty famous among her friends for ruthlessly celebrating her birth-month. She told me last year that it was something she did as a spiritual practice. She grew up being taught that celebrating yourself, even feeling good about yourself, was wrong. So she chooses to celebrate herself as an act of self-love, one that resists and unlearn toxic things she came to believe about herself growing up.

How great is that? Celebrating as an act of love and resistance?

I think that’s another reason I love birthdays so much: think about what we’re actually celebrating: you were born. How much input did you have in that decision? Zero. What did you do to earn being born? Nothing.

And yet here you are in all your glory.

There’s something in the birthday celebrating that acknowledges the glory and beauty of just existing. We’re not really celebrating your accomplishments and achievements so much as we’re just celebrating you.

Why all the talk of birthdays? Because today is Pentecost, the birthday of the Church. So I want to celebrate the Church today. As we’ve discussed a lot this series and this past year, the Church is far from perfect. Both from a global perspective and our own local community here. But this is Jesus’ church, the space where heaven and earth come together to bring justice and healing into the world. So let’s celebrate the power of the Holy Spirit to bring new life. Let’s celebrate new life and new hope and the possibilities that us being together today brings. Let’s celebrate!

Message

Welcome to Pentecost! This is the end of the Church year, the last holy day before we head into what we call Ordinary Time. Pentecost is the culmination of everything we’ve been celebrating since Christmas. It’s the day the Church was formed by God sending the Holy Spirit to transform us from a bunch of people in the same room to the Body of Christ visible to the world. Our series that began after Easter has been called RECONNECTED. We’re asking what it looks like to be plugged in - both to God and to the world to which God calls us.

What are the practices, attitudes and orientations God calls us to and gifts us with that enable us to be a church that engages and cares about the world around us?

For these questions, we’re in the book of Acts, which recounts the beginnings of the church. How did we go from a group of scared people who fled from the authorities when Jesus was arrested to a group that faced down persecution and fearlessly spread the good news of Jesus’ resurrection to the world around us? How can we recover the same sort of bold faith we in those first followers in the wake of Jesus’ resurrection?

We began by reflecting on the impossibility of our call - to embody Jesus in this broken and breaking world? How could we possibly accomplish all God call us to? We can’t, which is why God gives us the Holy Spirit. Then we explored what it means to worship together, and to be together in a way that orients us not toward ourselves, but to the larger world, especially those who are most vulnerable. We looked at what makes a good disciple, and the surprising way God is present among those who don’t know Jesus yet. Last week, we saw that God calls to share the good news of Jesus’ resurrection even with those who claim to be part of the faith but whose lives do not demonstrate

Today is Pentecost. It’s the day we celebrate God’s gift to us of the Holy Spirit.

We have 2,000 years of Church as a group of humans without Jesus present, but can you imagine how confused and afraid those first disciples were when Jesus kept talking about leaving them?

Turn with us to John 14.

This bit actually comes from before Jesus’ crucifixion, from the conversation Jesus had with his disciples at the Last Supper. You can hear in their questions the anxiety and fear they have over Jesus’ increasingly strange behavior and teachings. They’re reaching out for certainty and clarity. You’ll notice, though, that Jesus doesn’t offer them that. He offers them something better:

John 14:8–16 NLT

Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” Jesus replied, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and yet you still don’t know who I am? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father! So why are you asking me to show him to you? Don’t you believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words I speak are not my own, but my Father who lives in me does his work through me. Just believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me. Or at least believe because of the work you have seen me do. “I tell you the truth, anyone who believes in me will do the same works I have done, and even greater works, because I am going to be with the Father. You can ask for anything in my name, and I will do it, so that the Son can bring glory to the Father. Yes, ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it! “If you love me, obey my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, who will never leave you.

When they want to ‘see the Father’ - the same request once made by Moses, a plea for certainty and the comfort that comes from knowing you’re not crazy even when it seems like the whole world is against you. But Jesus says, “If you see me, you’ve already seen the Father.”

Now, that didn’t seem to do much for Philip, and he actually got to see Jesus. What about the rest of us, 2,000 years removed from Jesus’ ascension to the throne of Heaven?

Good thing Jesus said that what’s coming next - the gift of the Spirit - is actually better than his presence. Why? Because the Holy Spirit is coming. At Christmas, we celebrated God with us - God come out of heaven to live among us. And now, at Pentecost, we celebrate the Holy Spirit - God come to dwell within us!

BREAK

Turn with us to Acts 2.

Let’s read the story of Pentecost. If you’ve been with us, you may remember how hard the disciples struggled, even in the wake of the resurrection, to understand how thoroughly Jesus’ resurrection confirmed how radical God’s way really is. That all changed today, on Pentecost. Let’s read:

Acts 2:1–18 NLT

On the day of Pentecost all the believers were meeting together in one place. Suddenly, there was a sound from heaven like the roaring of a mighty windstorm, and it filled the house where they were sitting. Then, what looked like flames or tongues of fire appeared and settled on each of them. And everyone present was filled with the Holy Spirit and began speaking in other languages, as the Holy Spirit gave them this ability. At that time there were devout Jews from every nation living in Jerusalem. When they heard the loud noise, everyone came running, and they were bewildered to hear their own languages being spoken by the believers. They were completely amazed. “How can this be?” they exclaimed. “These people are all from Galilee, and yet we hear them speaking in our own native languages! Here we are—Parthians, Medes, Elamites, people from Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus, the province of Asia, Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt, and the areas of Libya around Cyrene, visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism), Cretans, and Arabs. And we all hear these people speaking in our own languages about the wonderful things God has done!” They stood there amazed and perplexed. “What can this mean?” they asked each other. But others in the crowd ridiculed them, saying, “They’re just drunk, that’s all!” Then Peter stepped forward with the eleven other apostles and shouted to the crowd, “Listen carefully, all of you, fellow Jews and residents of Jerusalem! Make no mistake about this. These people are not drunk, as some of you are assuming. Nine o’clock in the morning is much too early for that. No, what you see was predicted long ago by the prophet Joel: ‘In the last days,’ God says, ‘I will pour out my Spirit upon all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy. Your young men will see visions, and your old men will dream dreams. In those days I will pour out my Spirit even on my servants—men and women alike— and they will prophesy.

The Spirit falls and immediately, the Church receives the ability to tell the good story of Jesus’ resurrection to anyone who will listen. It’s such a strange even that for some, the only explanation is a drunken party. But Peter soon clears that up and says, “People of Jerusalem, this isn’t some crazy new thing. This is what we’ve all been waiting for. This is the fulfillment of promise.”

Friends, we’re gathered today for a celebration. And it’s not a celebration with our heads in the sand. We’re not here pretending the Church is perfect, or that the very real sins of our past don’t matter.

What we’re celebrating is that God refuses to let our sin or the evil in the world have the last word.

To those first disciples, who couldn’t understand who Jesus was and what he offered, God sent not condemnation but the life-giving Spirit.

The same is true for us. In the midst of our doubts and questions, our critiques and pains, God offers not pithy proverbs or condescending shushing but the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead to guide and teach us and bind us together.

To those citizens of Jerusalem who were happy to collaborate with Rome to execute Jesus for the sake of keeping the peace, God sent not judgment and vengeance, but a people who offered an invitation to forgiveness and transformation.

So too for us. In a culture where religion and politics have made toxic bedfellows, God invites us to be a holy alternative, to become a source of the Holy Spirit’s refreshing breeze, healing both those hurt by the church and those who have been complicit in their wounding.

Communion + Examen

We receive Jesus’ invitation through the same Spirit he promised!

How have I experienced the Holy Spirit’s presence in my life in the last week?

When have I ignored or closed myself off to the Holy Spirit in the last week?

How might I be tempted to ignore the Holy Spirit in this next week?

How can I make space to be open to the Holy Spirit this week?

Assignment + Blessing

Now as many as are led by the Spirit of God are daughters and sons of God. For you all did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall again into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption through which we cry, “Abba! Father!” It is that same Spirit who bears witness with our spirits that we are daughters and sons of God. And if daughters and sons, then heirs, heirs of God and heirs with Christ, if it is true that we suffer with Christ so that we may also be glorified with Christ.

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the daughters and sons of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the daughters and sons of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope is that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as is necessary, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mindset of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. — Romans 8:14-27