Transcription
I’m reading from Numbers 11, 24 through 30, and it’s on the Bible 117. So Moses went out and told the people the words of the Lord, and he gathered 70 elders of the people and placed them all around the tent. Then the Lord came down in the cloud and spoke to him and took some of the spirit that was on him and put it on the 70 elders. And when the spirit rested upon them, they prophesied, but they did not do so again. Two men remained in the camp, one named Eldad and the other named Medad, and the spirit rested on them. They were among those registered, but they had not gone out to the tent, and so they prophesied in this camp. And a young man ran and told Moses, Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp. And Joshua, son of Nun, the assistant of Moses, one of the chosen men, said, my Lord Moses, stop them. But Moses said to them, are you jealous for my sake? Were that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put his spirit on them? And Moses and the elders of Israel returned to the camp.
Brothers and sisters, our New Testament reading comes from the book of Acts. Acts chapter two, verses one through 21. Hear God’s word.
When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all gathered together at one place. And suddenly there was, there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues as of fire appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. 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. And at this sound, the crowd gathered and was bewildered because each one heard them speaking in the native tongue of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear each of us in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus in Asia, Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt in the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs in our own language. We hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power. All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, what does this mean? But others sneered and said, they are filled with new wine.
But Peter, standing with the 11, 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. Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine in the morning. 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 and I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and smoky mist. The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day. Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.
This is the word of the Lord.
Let us pray. Gracious and loving God, we thank you. We thank you for your spirit that was given this day. We thank you for all the ways in which it leads us and guides us and keeps us. We thank you for the son who went to the cross for us and we thank you, the father, whose plan has come, whose plan is being worked out through us. Open the scriptures today to us so that we might be changed and transformed through them. In your name we pray, amen.
Pentecost has come.
Okay, I realize I’m a minister and so that makes me a little nerdy about the church calendar year, but Pentecost is an exciting day. Think about it. Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost are kind of the big three days. Sure, Ash Wednesday’s awesome, but bear with me on this about Pentecost, because it’s not just any day. Now, as we sit here and celebrate the gift of the spirit, it’s hard to think about the spirit and not also think about the difficult relationship we all kind of have with the spirit. The spirit is that part of us, that part of God that calls us, chases us, moves us, and sometimes when the spirit calls, hello, oh, sorry, wrong number. Nope, nope, wrong number. Sometimes when the spirit calls, we treat it like it’s a telemarketer. So when we see the disciples here, they’re waiting and wondering. They’re waiting to see what happens next. What’s the next step? Jesus has ascended. He’s told them to go back, and they did. He’s promised that something is gonna happen. The paraclete that I talked about two weeks ago. The paraclete is coming, and so the disciples are like, all right, waiting, Jesus. It’s not here yet. You know, kind of like that kid at Christmastime sort of feel. But the difficulty in this waiting is not whether or not God will fulfill it. It’s whether the disciples will be faithful as it comes. Will they be faithful as it happens? Will they be faithful as they wait? It’s not like Jesus sent them an email that says, here’s your tracking number on the Holy Spirit. It’ll be here on this day. You know, it’s not like they can open up an app and five more stops before your doordash and your Holy Spirit get there. It’s not like that. The challenge here is that they are told to wait with no assistance on when the waiting will end. All they can do is be faithful until it comes.
Now, they’ve been prepared for quite a while by Jesus about the waiting side of things. They’ve been told, you’ve gotta wait. You have to be prepared. You have to be continually there. And here’s the challenge. The challenge here is that there’s a difference between waiting on an eventuality and waiting forever. And every time you prepare kids or get them ready, what happens? They’re not gonna be ready. And so, you have to trust the process. You have to trust that these disciples are gonna be there, they’re gonna be faithful, and they’re gonna wait.
Imagine how they’re waiting. You’ve got Thomas pacing back and forth, going, I can’t do this anymore, Peter. I can’t do. You’ve got the guy who’s probably tapping his foot, going, any time, any time. They’re probably all in this bundle of anxiety and tension because you got 11 people plus the other believers all waiting on this moment. And if one person doesn’t wait well, then that expand the group and it’s just not a good point. And yet, something else happens here. In the midst of all of this happening is the festival of Pentecost.
Now, Pentecost is one of those festivals where everybody within a certain region, 20 miles if I remember right, is supposed to come into Jerusalem. If you lived 20 miles outside of Jerusalem, you had to be in Jerusalem for Pentecost. No matter who you are, where you were, that 20 mile radius, and before anybody asks and cracks jokes about, well, did anybody step outside the radius, just have like a warning line? Do I think they had a warning line? Probably, but we’ll cover that in a less worshipful moment.
Now, it’s called Pentecost because it is 50 days after Passover. And it’s one of those two piece celebrations that is fairly large in this time of year. And it memorializes and celebrates the giving of the law, 10 commandments, the whole law to Moses. And if you read that festival in light of the waiting for the law and the golden calf that happens in the meantime, what are you also thinking about as the disciples wait? Will they be faithful as they wait? And the question gets answered as all of a sudden there’s that violent wind that comes or the noise of a violent wind. And if you’ve ever heard that tornado like that high wind sound, you’ll never forget it. It sounds close to a freight train, but not quite. It’s loud, it’s obnoxious, it will stick in your ears forever. So this is in a slight breeze. And think about this also, there are not commonly tornadoes in Israel. So you have this huge, high, loud sound of a wind and all of a sudden that kicks everything off. But it’s not different from things God has done before. Think about Elijah when he’s on that long retreat, that burnout moment of his, where he goes and hides in a cave. What happens there? A whole lot of natural occurrences, fire, flames, earthquake, and a sound of loud wind. But where is God in all of that? Not in the wind, but in the silence. And as the spirit comes all of a sudden, this violent wind, the spirit arrives.
Now, I want you to think about how earth shattering this wind moment is. Because we live in a very loud world, don’t we? We hear sirens, cars, I think I don’t go an hour in the parsonage not having to hear a J-braked semi-truck on 209. The fact is, it’s a loud world, but think of a quieter, quieter world. And what the sound of this wind does throughout Jerusalem. Yes, it’s a large city. Yes, it’s a bustling metropolis for the time period. But it’s a quieter place. And if you heard that freight train sound of wind, that loud wind, what is that gonna do? So the disciples have received the spirit. It has moved around and through them and filled them. And this loud noise that God has sent with the spirit draws people in. They’ve heard a noise. Have you ever been to a store and all of a sudden there’s this loud crash? What does everybody do? Well, if they’re in the aisle where it happens, they just turn and go, ooh. But if they aren’t in the aisle, they’re gonna kind of look, they’re gonna do the Dippin’ Bob, the walk past. They’re gonna try and find out where the noise is. Think about all those people there in the city for Pentecost who hear this freight train wind noise. What are they gonna do? They’re gonna check it out. They’re gonna go try and find out what is this noise? What has made it? What’s going on? And then they find it. They find it in the person of the disciples who even though as scripture says, they’re from Galilee, they’re from the backwoods. They maybe speak two languages, Aramaic and Jewish. Maybe two. They don’t speak Egyptian. They don’t speak Latin. And yet here they are all prophesying in a different language. People from all around the world are in this moment, have been drawn to this moment and they hear their own language. The language they were born to hear. Can you imagine your own home language being the language that is spoken by the disciples? You don’t have to learn something else to hear your words of God. It is spoken as you know it. Think about the beauty that that is.
Now, I want you to picture a moment and forgive me, it’s a movie. But in the movie Luther, Peter Ustinov is sitting there reading Lord knows what. He’s playing Frederick the Wise, the elector of Saxony. And in walks Martin Luther carrying this book. And what is the book? What is the great gift that he’s bringing to this prince of men? German language, New Testament.
Now, we think, oh, Martin Luther, this great theologian. The prince has him there, he’s gonna talk theology. Literally in the moment he says, oh great, yeah, this is gonna cause problems. This is gonna cause problems. Can you leave the gift and just go? He doesn’t care about the theologian. He doesn’t care about this great man steeped in learning about scripture. What he cares about in that moment is opening the Bible and reading God’s word in his own language. Think about these people who have come and now hear this gift of the Holy Spirit of their own language, hearing the word of God. Pentecost is so absolutely beautiful in all the things God does. But think about how God is in that first moment and the gift that that is. Can you imagine if we had worship services still as the RSA originally intended way back when we spoke the very word of God in Dutch? Have to learn Dutch just to hear worship? All the readings would be in Dutch. All the readings of scripture would be as Jesus first said them in Dutch. And I joke about that, but meet some people from West Michigan and you’ll understand. The fact of the matter is it is awesome what the Spirit has done. It is awesome what the Spirit does there, but that’s just a fraction of what the Spirit has done and is doing.
Earlier I talked to the kids about the most fearful person when it comes to public speaking. I still think I got them beat. And Barb, when she was getting ready for her play or her performance, her band performance, said, but what do I do, Dad? I said, just pray a lot and understand that God’s gonna be with you and hopefully that’s enough. And she made it through, but she said, you’re afraid of speaking in front of people? Yeah, yeah, I am. And yet somehow God called me in ministry. Somehow I’m able to get in front of you all every Sunday, and yet some of you have been called as elders or deacons, and you never would have as a young person thought the same. Some of us have been called to help others. The fact is we could not predict when we were that age how the Spirit was gonna use us, how the Spirit was gonna call us and challenge us. The beauty of this is is that God’s Spirit adjusts to the moment and makes us adjust to what God has planned for us. Are we always going to feel fully equipped for what God calls us to do? No, we are going to feel woefully equipped. But what we feel is not necessarily the reality with the Spirit. The Spirit will equip us. The Spirit will get us there. But we have to answer the call of the Spirit.
One of the things that a lot of us do from the pulpit today is talk about being more comfortable with the Spirit. And guess what? Even I’ve fallen into that. And the more and more the Spirit is and exists, the more and more I understand we’re never gonna be comfortable with the Spirit. You’re never gonna be comfortable. The Spirit is about discomfort. When the Spirit calls you to something, you shouldn’t be comfortable with what it’s asking you to do because usually it’s something big. It’s bigger than you want to be. It’s bigger than you want to do. And yet the Spirit gets you there, gets you through it.
I remember one minister I was talking to, he was in his 80’s and had a pretty good sense of humor. And he said, Don, do you ever get comfortable with the Holy Spirit? Do you ever get comfortable with the things it asks you to do? He took a deep breath inside and said, you know, I used to say that that’s how I would know it was time to call it quits and retire. And then he said, but then I retired and I’m still not okay with some of the things the Spirit is calling me to do now. He had been 10 years retired and was doing prison ministry because God wasn’t done with him yet. Discomfort comes with the Spirit, but peace with God comes through serving the Spirit. So brothers and sisters, however the Father and Son are coming and calling through the Spirit for us to be, to do the work we are called to participate in, may we listen. May we not necessarily exist in a place of comfortability, but we can at least exist in a place where though we are profoundly uncomfortable, we trust and know that God is with us. So listen to the Spirit, brothers and sisters.
And now let us respond to God through our gifts.