Feast of Pentecost 26

Acts 2:1-11

Many years ago, Julie Andrews starred in the musical “the sound of music.”  She was a difficult novice in a convent and one of the songs lamented the nun’s frustration about her unconventional behavior by saying “what are we going to do about Maria.”  Pentecost is that kind of feast day in our salvation history. We do not know how to respond to it, because it seems to be a historical event referred to as the “birth of the church.” 

Wait until you are clothed from on high, Jesus told them.  It is the promise of the Father, made to every believer by every prophet.  It is to be embraced as much as we embrace Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection.  To understand Pentecost, we need more than a few readings on Pentecost Sunday.  We need to go back to the beginning of God’s relationship with us who were made in the image and likeness of Gd. Destined to share intimacy with God.  We know that intimacy was broken by the sin of Adam but God’s plan for us never changed.

What did change is what would be necessary for us to share intimacy with God. Sin would aways create a barrier between us and God.  But God has the power over sin and with the covenant with Moses God established a framework of laws which defined behavior which would define behavior pleasing to God. Paul, expressed this when he wrote “… law functioned as our disciplinarian until the law of the Spirit came.”  The law defined sin, it functioned as    our guard rails until we begin to understand we will never overcome sin.  The rot of sin is imbedded in us and the scriptures tell us “…out of our hearts come unrighteousness, greed, envy, deceit, murder deceit, malice and folly. Big sins and little sins, all sin separates us from God. 

What we have failed to grasp is God’s plan was to build on that foundation of laws. Ultimately opening us to do exactly what the disciples did and that is to pray for the promise of God to be manifested in our lives.  God’s plan was to equip us for holiness, not for us to believe we can attain holiness through our own acts of piety.  God plan was for our sin to be forgiven by the sacrifice of Jesus as the sacrificial lamb demanded by the law. But knowing we would still sin. His plan was to change our hearts.  The promise of God was to change our hearts so we would be empowered to do God’s will.  Jeremiah prophesied God would write His law on our hearts so we would know, and we would do His will.  But the root word for “knowing has a deeper meaning than physical intellectual knowing.  It was first used in the scriptures in the Book of Genesis – Adam knew Eve and she conceived and bore a son.   Jesu’s ascension has made the outpouring of the Spirit possible. God’s plan for our holiness has been initiated by the death and resurrection and by the outpouring of the Spirit into the hearts of those who desire intimacy with God. Not to please God but to become what we were created to become. The Holy Spirit will pour God’s love into your hearts compelling you to freely love God in return.    

Pentecost is intended to be more than one moment it is a lifetime of dependency on the Spirit to continually transform us from one degree of holiness to another.  It is a promise to assist us to pray from our hearts not our heads.  It is a moment in our lives we all must welcome and desire because we do desire to know we are pleasing to God.   It is a moment we must seek every morning to guide us each day to live lives worthy of the calling of Christ.  It empowers us to be bold witnesses of God’s mercy and forgiveness.

It is a necessary baptism we must experience as it is the baptism of fire and spirit we all must experience.  It is more than the birth of the church, it is our rebirth promised by Jesus – unless you are reborn you cannot enter the kingdom of God (Jn.3:5),