Welcome to the season of Pentecost! As we continue in the journey
of the Christian year, Pentecost marks the day we celebrate the presence and
work of the Holy Spirit in our world. It’s a time of celebration and
expectation for God to create something new in our lives, showing us new depths
of maturity in our relationship with Him. Following Pentecost, we enter into
Common Time, where we have the opportunity to dig into some of the “nitty-gritty”
issues of the Christian life.
The lectionary passages for this season call us to get busy
working through the nuts and bolts of our faith. The working-out of our salvation
(many times with fear and trembling!) is the theme that ties the season and
this sermon series together. We display liturgical colors in our gatherings
and use a children’s sermon time to teach the congregation the meaning
of each color. As the fire-cleansing red of Pentecost gives way to the green
of common time, we call our people to a summer of spiritual growth and maturity.
We are going to jump into some of the important claims of the Gospel while
looking in a mirror and examining our own lives. Do we as individuals, families,
and a community of faith really live what we say we believe? In the next few
weeks we are going to find out.
Acts 2 is one of the most popular passages in the New Testament.
Many different “tribes” within Christianity, including the Church
of the Nazarene, look at Acts 2 as foundational to their core beliefs concerning
the Christian life and experience. Before we begin reading, we must acknowledge
that this passage is already laden with denominational, doctrinal, and traditional
meaning. As he or she approaches this important chapter, the preacher in our
particular tradition faces a significant exegetical challenge: how do we engage
this passage without committing eisegesis, or reading into the text a meaning
which we have decided beforehand? Especially on Pentecost Sunday, how do we
preach Acts 2 in such a way that God speaks anew through the text, communicating
His own message? Listening to the text is vitally important here.
It’s impossible to overstate the community aspect of the
presence and gifts of the Holy Spirit. It is no mistake that Luke reminds
his readers that Christ’s followers “were all together in one
place” (v. 1, nrsv). When the Spirit comes, He comes to the gathered
community of faith. The tongues of fire rest on each one of them and then
“all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit” (v. 4, nrsv). The
coming of the Spirit in Acts 2 is not presented as an individualistic phenomenon.
Rather, Luke uses plural words like “they,” “them,”
and “all” when speaking of the outpouring.
The gift of the Spirit that immediately follows is also community-centered.
The coming of the Spirit results in the ability to speak in other languages,
so that members of “every nation under heaven” (v. 5) could hear
the story of “God’s deeds” (v. 11, nrsv) in their own language.
It is striking that the first gift of the Spirit is one that results in the
inclusion of outsiders. This reflects one of Luke’s major themes throughout
Luke-Acts, namely the kingdom of God is not just for Israel; not just for
the insiders. Instead, the grace of God is offered to Jerusalem, all Judea,
Samaria and to the ends of the earth (1:8).
Acts 1 paints an unflattering picture of the disciples. After
all, they had seen and experienced (see the Gospel of Luke), after being with
Jesus for forty days after His resurrection and hearing (again) His teaching
about the kingdom of God (Acts 1:3), they still didn’t “get it.”
“So when they had come together, they asked Him, ‘Lord, is this
the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?’” (Acts
1:6, nrsv). They still thought Jesus’ mission was all about reestablishing
the earthly, temporal kingdom of Israel. By their own actions they demonstrate
their need for the power of the Holy Spirit to open their eyes to the true
nature of God’s mission to the world.
God’s response is an epiphany of truly biblical proportions.
Just as He promised, the Holy Spirit comes in a powerful, undeniable way.
The wind of the Spirit (both words for wind and Spirit come from the same
root word in Greek) blew and the fire of God fell, just as it had in the time
of the patriarchs and prophets. All were filled with the Spirit, and in a
moment, their mission changed. They found themselves speaking in other languages:
Galileans spoke Egyptian. Israelites spoke Arabic. Outsiders became insiders
because the Holy Spirit had broken down the barriers between them. Peter,
the disciple who had denied Jesus, preached as he never had, and 3,000 people
came to faith in Jesus. The disciples’ narrow vision of Jesus’
ministry evaporated and was replaced with a much truer sense of God’s
mission to redeem the world.
Before preaching this passage to our congregations, perhaps
Acts 2 calls for a response in us, the preachers, first. What if we are making
the same mistake the disciples did? What if we are so entrenched in our way
of working the church system that we miss what God wants to do through us?
What if we become so dazzled by the “success” of some suburban
megachurches and “effectiveness” of the pastor down the street
that we miss the outsiders in our own community? What if we allowed the Holy
Spirit to transform us, perhaps to the point of changing our language, so
that insiders and outsiders could hear of God’s deeds from our mouths?
This passage makes me want to repent of building my “kingdom of Israel”
and get busy seeking the kingdom of God.
The passage calls for a community response as well. What if
we moved beyond an individualistic interpretation of Acts 2 and called our
congregations to be filled with the Spirit? We’re getting better at
speaking of corporate sin. What if we started speaking of corporate holiness
as well?
(For the full manuscript
of this sermon go to www.preachersmagazine.org and click on “Sermons.”)
Preaching is an opportunity to cause a head-on collision between the world of the congregation and the world of the Biblical text. In this collision, the Holy Spirit can do some amazing things. For this particular text, I use an “alternating the story” narrative form. My desire is to set up the disciple’s pre-Pentecost way of thinking: the kingdom of God, they thought, was really about the kingdom of Israel. I want to connect that with how we sometimes think about church and effectiveness in ministry. Then the Spirit comes, and everything changes, for both the early disciples and for us. The Spirit brings a new vision of the Church and the power and ability to live as the Church.
