Pentecost 2011

06/12/11 Pentecost 2011 Hudson UMC
In spite of the fact that it is an emotional experience to stand up in front of the congregation that has supported my journey through seminary and my first five years in pastoral ministry and deliver my second-to-last sermon to you, I must admit that I am glad that, since it has to end, it can end in this season. Today is Pentecost where we celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the church, where we human beings have more fully than ever before been grafted into the ministry of God in our world of space and time. Next week, in addition to being Father's Day, it is Trinity Sunday, and, as you may or may not know, I am very interested in the Trinity and how the Trinity has deep implications, not only for academic theology, but also for our regular Christian lives.
So, since today is Pentecost, we must ask, what is the Holy Spirit? Actually, I must apologize for asking the question this way. After all, in spite of the fact that we usually seem to speak of the Spirit as a what, it really isn't the case. The Spirit is a who. The problem is that, when we talk about people that are whos and not whats, we only have two options in English, "he" and "she." However, we cannot imagine that the Spirit is really biologically male or female. But the word "It" doesn't really help, because, once we go back to calling the Spirit "It," we have gone right back into the old problem of thinking of the Spirit as a what and not a who.
This might be a frustrating thing to us, because, as hard as it is to understand Jesus and as incredibly difficult as it is to get a clear grasp on God the Father, it is next to impossible to get some kind of image in our minds of who the Spirit is. Every time we think that we get a grip on who the Spirit is and figure the Spirit out, we realize that it doesn't quite work. The Spirit continually eludes us and leaves us asking questions, never really answering them. We might regret this, but I can't help but believe that this is not a coincidence. After all, the second of the Ten Commandments was a prohibition against the making of images. Lest we think that, because God has revealed himself definitively in Jesus Christ, we can put God in a little box and keep him contained, so that he can never surprise us, the Spirit reminds us that God is always greater. Though it is indeed true that God has really make himself known to us in Jesus Christ, we must never get deceived into believing that we have gotten God all figured out.
In fact, it is precisely because God has revealed himself to us in Jesus Christ and that the Holy Spirit is indeed of the same being as Christ that I think we tend to misunderstand the Spirit and miss the real significance of the Spirit's work in our lives. There are two ways that I want to highlight the connection between the Spirit and Christ, which is so strong that we can truly speak of the Holy Spirit, as the Bible does, as "The Spirit of Christ."
The first of these is the mutual mediation of Christ and the Spirit. What this means is that our knowledge of Christ and our knowledge of the Spirit are absolutely bound to one another, whether we realize it or not. After all, how did we receive the Spirit for the very first time? If we simply read the Pentecost narrative, we might get the impression that the Spirit was a gift to humanity that is largely independent of what Christ has done among us. If that were the case, we could ask the question, "Why did God wait so long to sent that Spirit? Why could the Spirit not have been given long before?" However, when we remember what Jesus said to his disciples, we realize that this is not the way to think about it. What did he say? "Nevertheless I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you." Jesus ties the gift of the Spirit with everything that he was doing among them. If Jesus had not come, lived, died, been raised and ascended to the Father, the Spirit simply could not have come. Our ability to receive the Spirit is utterly connected to what Christ has done among us.
So, it becomes clear that we can only receive the Spirit in and through Christ, but that is not the end of it. As it turns out, we can only receive Christ in and through the Spirit. There are some who might think this is odd. After all, are there not several people who seem to receive Christ without any reference to the Spirit at all? Surely we can point to several instances in the New Testament where people have something that certainly seems like faith in Christ before the Spirit was given. If that is the case, how can we possibly say that we do not receive Christ except in and through the Spirit, who was not sent until Pentecost?
And yet, we need to look, not just at what seems to be the case at any given time, but at the whole story. There is probably no greater example than Judas. Now, we come to the Gospel already knowing what happens to Jesus, that Judas betrays him. And yet, we need to always remember that absolutely nobody expected Judas to do what he did. If we remember the story of the Last Supper, we realize that, when Jesus said that he would be betrayed by one of his followers, the people did not say, "Oh, I'll bet its Judas. He's always been pretty shifty." Rather, they responded by wondering who it could possibly be. Judas was so well liked, so well trusted by the disciples and those who knew them, that they made him the treasurer of the group. The fact that Judas was anything less than the very most faithful of all people would have been utterly unthinkable.
Only slightly less clear of an example is Peter. He was a disciple who, if possible, seemed even more dedicated to his master. He not only did not betray Christ, he declared his undying faithfulness, that, if necessary, he would die rather than leave his side. He seemed to prove this because, when the police came for Jesus, he pulled out his sword and struck at one of the mob who was there to take him away.
And yet, Peter, this faithful one, did not follow through, did he? Rather, he joined the others and scattered. When he was directly asked about his relation to Jesus, he denied it three times. Even after Christ was raised from the dead, Peter was the one who led the others back to the fishing boat, to a lifestyle that goes back to a time before Jesus entered into their lives. Whatever faith Peter seemed to have, he only became the rock that Jesus said he would be at Pentecost. He was not already that rock; in fact, he seemed to be pretty wishy-washy. It was only when the Spirit entered into his life that he really knew Christ and followed him.
This is a challenging thing for us today. We live in a culture that judges outward actions, but condemns any attempt to judge inner intentions. Because of this, it is so easy to equate Christian faith with outward behavior. We see that a person is a good person, therefore, we assume, they must love God and have a vibrant faith. And yet, if the New Testament teaches us anything, it is that appearances can be deceiving. It has been said that the last great hiding place from God is the church, where people are so concerned about the fact that they do not really know God that they hide behind church activity and moral behavior. To drive it even closer to home, one might say that the last great hiding place to hide from God in the church is the seminary. There are many who go to seminary to train for pastoral ministry, only to find that they had never yet known Christ in faith.
What this means is that if we realize that we need to understand and listen to the Spirit, we cannot do so unless we devote ourselves to understanding and listening to Christ, for it is only through Christ that we can understand what the Spirit is doing. It also means that, if we want people to come to Christ, to give themselves to Jesus and to understand the life-changing power of God, it means that we must pray for the Spirit to move, for it is only through the Spirit that we can know Christ and his good news.
The other major point that we need to grasp about the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Christ, is also exemplified in Jesus' words from John. "I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you."
This is really just about the most astonishing thing that Jesus says to his disciples. What he is saying is that, because of the weakness of human beings, there are many things that he wished that he could tell his disciples but they simply could not bear them at the time. The first thing is how astonishing it is that God would, in any way, be limited by our inability to receive. However, before we start despairing because, if God's work in our lives can be limited or frustrated because of our inabilities, we are surely lost, we must listen to what else Jesus is saying, for it is even more incredible yet.
Jesus is saying that his disciples cannot bear what he has to say to them. This is not surprising to us who know the rest of the story because the disciples all scatter when he is arrested. Clearly they aren't capable of really understanding what Jesus has to say. But that is not the final word. Jesus does not simply say, "Well, you can't handle it, so I guess you'll never know the truth." Instead he says that, after he goes away, the Spirit of truth will come and take the things of Christ and reveal them to his disciples. But this Spirit is not going to bring a strange message that bears no relation to what Jesus himself has said and done. Rather, Jesus points out that this Spirit will not speak on his own, but will speak what he hears, from Christ and the Father.
This radically intimate connection between Christ and the Holy Spirit is precisely why I have said before and will say again, that Pentecost is the most frightening and yet most encouraging of all Christian holidays. The reason why it is encouraging is that it is because of the giving of the Spirit of God to the church on Pentecost that we affirm that we, too, have been given the Spirit of Christ. By the power of this Spirit of Christ, we are utterly united to the ministry of Christ in this world of space and time. We as a church are commissioned by God to do the kinds of things that Jesus did, to teach the kinds of things that Jesus taught and be the kinds of people who Jesus was and, indeed, still is. And lest we think that this is impossible, this commission does not come merely to human beings, but to human beings who are indwelled by the very Spirit of God, who is of one and the same being as the Father and the Son, who not only takes up residence, but binds us to Christ in all things and in every way. It is the most encouraging of all days because we can take comfort that, when we set ourselves to be about God's business, it is not as though we are doing so in isolation from God, but are so connected to him that, in a very real sense, it is God doing God's business in and through us.
If that is why Pentecost is so encouraging, how could it possibly be frightening? It is frightening for exactly the same reasons that it is encouraging. It is frightening because, if it is really true that we are people who are not only people, but people intimately joined to God through Christ and in the Holy Spirit, then we are free for many things, but what we are not free to do is to live our lives as if the Holy Spirit had not been given and had not been received. It means that to live lives inconsistent with the life and work of Christ is not merely sinful and not merely inconsistent with our calling as the children of God, but it is utterly irrational. To behave as if the God revealed to us in Jesus Christ had not reached into our lives and transformed us and to live as though this God has nothing to say about how we treat one another, is foolish in the highest. To go about our lives in such a way that they are indistinguishable from the lives of those who either do not know God or actively hate him is to say either that God did not come among us, that he did not die for us, that he did not rise for us, and that he was not ascended for us, or that, at the end of the day, we simply do not believe it.
Pentecost, and the fact that the Spirit has been given to God's people without measure is frightening because many of us are not entirely sure if the kind of life that is demanded by the Spirit dwelling inside of us is something that we really want, or whether we would rather continue doing things the way things have always been, when things made sense, when we knew what was going on and we were the ones who were finally in charge of our lives. It is frightening, not because we do not know what the life of the Spirit means, but that we know all too well what it means.
But, brothers and sisters, consider this. In the blink of an eye, the disciples went from being the kind of people who scatter the moment anything difficult comes against them to being the kind of people who not only died for their faith, but were absolutely willing to do so. Not one of the apostles was put to death against their will. Imagine what it would be like if we as a community, and each of us as members within it, were so utterly characterized by the power of the Spirit that we were as bold as the apostles were all those long years ago? Why could the spirit that transformed that first generation of Christians not move afresh and join us to their radical, self-sacrificing example? It has happened many times throughout history, not least in the original Methodist revival under John Wesley. Why not here? Why not now? If the only difference between the Peter who denied Christ three times and the Peter who laid his life down for the gospel is the gift of the Spirit, why can we not also be joined to that same Spirit?
We have been called with a holy calling, a commission to join in Christ's ministry, in a life-changing movement, not because we are talented as the world counts talent, nor because we are wise, nor because we are strong, but simply and for no other reason than that we have been bound to Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. Because of this, let us not trust in our talent, our wisdom, or our strength, but let us cling to Christ and to Christ alone, for he is the one who has redeemed us and has made us whole. Let us pray.

AMEN