Pentecost 2009

05/31/09
Pentecost 2009
Hudson UMC

Today is the day that the church worldwide celebrates Pentecost. As is the case with several of the Christian holidays, Pentecost was originally a Jewish celebration. On Passover, the Israelites were rescued, redeemed, and delivered from Egyptian oppression. And yet, though they were technically “free,” they do not consider their freedom to have truly come until fifty days later, when they received the Law from God. It is as if the Israelites, though they were already objectively free inasmuch as they were no longer slaves, were not yet really free until they were subjected to the Law of God. Their salvation was not complete until God became their master in all things.

If you think about the significance of the Christian celebration of Pentecost, there are some interesting parallels. On Good Friday and Easter Sunday, Christ died and rose again, paying the price to atone for our sin, objectively freeing us from the power of sin and death. And yet, the disciples were not really “redeemed,” they were not fully “saved,” until the Holy Spirit was poured out on the church fifty days later at Pentecost. It is as if, in a certain sense, the death of Christ was not enough to really free us from bondage, we must become participants in that reality by receiving the Holy Spirit. John Wesley, in his sermon, “Salvation by Faith,” argued that full Christian salvation only arrived with the giving of the Holy Spirit and was not present until that moment.

So, in light of the symbolism of this day, and in light of the fact that the church really did not come into existence until Pentecost, we can imagine that the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the church is a really big deal. However, as it turns out, many people within the Mainline Protestant tradition don’t really like to talk about the Holy Spirit. There are many reasons for this. Some people look at the groups of Christians who really emphasize the Spirit, the Pentecostals and Charismatics, and recoil from some of their excesses. Unfortunately, this tends to throw the baby out with the bathwater because the Holy Spirit is very important to the life of the church. Others view an appeal to the Holy Spirit to be a copout that we use to excuse ourselves from actually working in the world. Still others actually do talk about something which they call the Holy Spirit, but they do so in a way that desanctifies it, that reduces it to nothing more than our human spirits.

And so, in spite of all the emphasis that the New Testament and the Great Tradition of the Church place on the Holy Spirit, we in the mainline often forget it or rationalize it away. When Pentecost comes, we dress up in red, we read the story of that first Christian Pentecost all those long years ago, and listen to a sermon that may or may not actually make the gift of the Holy Spirit relevant to our Christian lives today. If we were to ask the average church member what Christmas and Easter are about, most could say that we are celebrating Christ’s birth and resurrection, respectively. If we were to ask them why these events really matter, they would probably say something about how God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son so that all who believe in Him might not perish but have everlasting life. We have some kind of a grasp on those holidays. I don’t think we are quite so clear on Pentecost. We know what it is, but I fear that we do not know why it matters.

Truth be told, I think that Pentecost is the single most frightening day of the entire Christian year. I think that Pentecost scares the daylights out of people because, more than any other holiday, Pentecost implicates us. We can believe that there is a God and go about our merry way. Many people have believed that God exists, but that He couldn’t possibly take interest in humanity. After all, we are so much lower than God and God surely has better things to do than listen to us. Even when Jesus Christ is born and God walked on this earth as a human being, we can think of this as outside of ourselves. After all, Jesus lived a long time ago and halfway around the world. Sure, He died for all of humanity, but there are so many people in the world, He cannot possibly have time for us. In Jesus, we know that God is for us, not against us, but we still relate to God in purely external ways. God is over there; we are over here. God loves us and we might even believe it, but we still think about it in general terms. God loves the world, Christ died for the world. All of it remains impersonal and external to us.

But when the Holy Spirit comes, all of this God stuff comes far too close for many people. We love the Christian doctrines of the Incarnation and the Atonement, because those are all things that are true regardless of whether or not we believe in them. Nothing we say or do can undo the fact that God became man in Jesus of Nazareth or that He died on a cross to pay for our sins. However, once we bring the Spirit in, especially when we look at what the Spirit does when He comes, it scares us to death. God does not only exist, God is not only for us, God is indeed in us, within our very being. Now, we can no longer think of our salvation in simply external terms, like we have a debt, and God pays it. Now, we must think of it as God penetrating our very being, cutting to the core of who we are and taking up residence. It is one thing to think that God might take sinful human nature upon God’s self to redeem it in the abstract, it is another thing altogether to think that God might enter into our broken and sinful humanity to redeem it from the inside out.

All of that theology aside, I think that what scares us the most is something very practical. I think that what scares us the most is what we see in the Pentecost story itself. We are frightened by what the Holy Spirit does to people. Throughout the Gospel narratives, we can identify with the disciples. They are weak, broken human beings, just like us. They have problems believing, they have false motives from time to time, they mess things up, they are timid, and they are afraid of persecution. All of those things are very encouraging to us because we realize that, if God can love people like them, surely He can love people like us.

It is precisely because we can relate so well to the disciples throughout the Gospels that the Pentecost story scares us so badly. Just take a look at Peter. He was a guy who stuck his foot in his mouth over and over again; he was a person who proved that he didn’t really understand Jesus time after time; he was a person who denied that he ever even knew Christ three times within only a few hours after he had promised to stay by His side, even unto death. What does the Holy Spirit do to this kind of guy? We read that he was absolutely transformed. The Spirit took this weak, half-hearted, wishy-washy guy and stood him up in front of thousands of people and had him preach the very first Christian sermon. I think that it is precisely this kind of thing that scares the daylights out of us.

Most of us don’t want to be preachers; we don’t want to be the kind of people who share their faith; we don’t want to seem like religious fanatics; though we relate strongly to the disciples before Pentecost, we don’t really want to be anything like they are after Pentecost. We want to live our lives quietly, glad that Jesus died for us, but quite content to live without the Spirit of God dwelling inside of us. It seems that we would rather be our own little “Jesus Club” where we listen to Jesus and sometimes follow Him and sometimes not than live in the post-Pentecost reality of a body empowered by the very Spirit of Christ. Maybe this is our case today, but let me remind you that, before the Holy Spirit was poured out on the church at Pentecost, it was a small church that was afraid and weak and ready to fall apart. Once the church received the Spirit of God, we read that the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved. If we try to be a church without the Spirit, if we hope to be Spiritless Christians, we will surely die. It is only when we allow the Spirit to move in our midst, when we listen to Him and respond to His callings, that we can make a difference and see the good news spread like wildfire.

So, what exactly does the Holy Spirit do in a Christian? Some would say that the Spirit brings extravagant gifts to the church, knocks people over and makes them speak in tongues. Some others would tend to emphasize that the Spirit moves us to continue Christ’s ministry here on earth now that Christ has ascended to heaven. If you were to ask a bunch of different people what the role of the Holy Spirit is, you would get a bunch of different answers. However, at their core, all of the legitimate activities of the Holy Spirit are summed up into this one idea: The Holy Spirit unites believers to Christ. We would almost expect this, right? After all, if we really believe that the Spirit is part of the Trinity that God is and is fundamentally inseparable from the Father and the Son, the Spirit cannot possibly do anything behind the back of Christ, as if we could finally separate them from one another.

We have one of the most important ways that the Spirit unites us to Christ in our reading from the book of Romans. Paul tells us that we have not received a spirit of slavery but a spirit of adoption. What do we read that the Spirit does? We read that the Spirit of God bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. That same Spirit causes us to cry out from the depths of our being, “Abba, Father!” the very same words of Christ. The Holy Spirit unites us, both men and women, to the Sonship of Christ to God the Father. We are grafted into the family of God in a way that we were not before we received the Spirit.

However, the Holy Spirit unites us to Christ in other ways as well. When we pray, the Spirit unites our prayer to the prayer of Christ, so that even our weak prayers are redeemed and heard by God. When we repent, we often do not even repent correctly, clinging to our sins more than we should. And yet, the Spirit takes that weak and broken repentance and grafts it into Christ’s repentance that He made on our behalf and in our place at His baptism. Even when we believe, our faith is weak and not sufficient on its own. However, we need not despair that our faith is weak, because the Spirit takes that, too, and unites it to the very faith of Christ.

Paul writes to the Galatians and says, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.” Paul is still living, but the real source of that life is Christ’s own life that he is participating in through the Holy Spirit. This participation involves us, but it only brings salvation because we are united to Christ. We could also say, “It is no longer I who pray, but Christ prays in me,” or “It is no longer I who repent, but Christ repents in me,” or “It is no longer I who believes, but Christ believes in me.” We are not let off the hook. We are still an active participant in our salvation and we cannot be saved without that participation, but God accepts us, not because we have been so good or because we pray so well or because we do so many good works or because our faith is so strong, but because God the Holy Spirit has united us to God the Son so that we might be accepted and grafted into the family of God the Father.

I hope you are beginning to grasp what this means for your life. What it means is that, though our faith might be weak, though we might not feel like we have yet been transformed like the disciples were, though we might feel that there is a long way to go, God has not left us alone. We are never released from our need to participate in the work that God is doing, but we need not ever do it alone. God has made the very strength of God available to us in the sending of the Holy Spirit. The gift that God gave the church on that Pentecost morning, nearly two thousand years ago, was not some kind of spiritual substance that can be detached from God, but God Himself. The Holy Spirit is just as much God as the Father and the Son. Indeed, the gift of God that is God unites us to God in a way that we cannot even begin to fully comprehend, and yet, it is the promise of the New Testament.

The disciples were transformed in the blink of an eye. Once they were weak and broken and unable to follow the Lord. After Pentecost, they were still weak and broken; we can read about some of their shortcomings in other books of the Bible, but they had become empowered people. Here is the good news for us today. As scary as it might seem to be indwelt by the very Spirit of God, it is an exhilarating thing. It is the very life of God being implanted into our hearts and empowering us to be the vehicles by which God imparts that same Spirit to others. Let us pray to be filled with the Spirit and sent into the world. Let us pray.

AMEN