Acts 2:1-4
Alan Taylor / General Adult
The Day of Pentecost / Holy Spirit; Faith / Acts 2:1–4
+ In Nomine Jesu +
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
The message on this Pentecost Sunday is based on the reading your heard earlier from Acts 2, but especially these few verses, “When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place. 2 And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. 3 And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. 4 And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.”
Jesus had Ascended to the right hand of the Father. He left His disciples and us His word and sent us the Holy Spirit who speaks to us through His word. As Luther reminds us in the Small Catechism, “the Holy Spirit has called you by the Gospel, enlightened you with His gifts and sanctified and kept you in the one true faith, even as He calls, gathers and enlightens the whole Christian Church on earth.”
To believe in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins, life and salvation, is always a miraculous work of God. Therefore, on this Pentecost Sunday we give thanks and praise to the Holy Spirit , for the work done in us by the power of the word. And we rejoice that, on this Day of Pentecost, the Spirit of God is still being poured out in abundance on those who once did not believe in Jesus and they are still coming to believe in Him for life and salvation. The Church then is continuing to prosper and grow “when and where it pleases Almighty God.”
The woman’s name is Holly Ordway. She is a professor of English at Houston Baptist University. At one time in her life she was an atheist, but now she’s a Christian. She spoke of her early years as an atheist. She said, “I had never in my life said a prayer. I’d never been to a church service either. Christmas meant presents and Easter meant chocolate bunnies and nothing more.”
She says, “In college, I absorbed the idea that Christianity was a historical curiosity, or a blemish on modern civilization, or perhaps both. My college science classes presented Christians as illiterate anti-intellectuals who, because they didn’t embrace Darwinism, threatened the advancement of knowledge. My history classes omitted or downplayed references to historical figures’ of faith.” “When I was about thirty-one years old, I was an atheist college professor–and I delighted in thinking of myself that way. I got a kick out of being an unbeliever; it was fun to consider myself superior to the unenlightened, superstitious masses, and to make snide comments about Christians.”
Holly eventually came to faith in Christ. As she looked back, she described the change that took place in her life. She said, “It is a hard thing to look at the truth when it runs contrary to what you’ve always believed. The experience is like pulling back the curtains in a dimly lit room and looking out the window to see what’s really there. When your eyes are use to artificial light, the bright sunlight is almost blinding; your eyes may sting and even water at the brightness, and the temptation is to turn away to the more comfortable dimness that you’ve been use to.”
Although Holly is extremely bright and very well read, she didn’t come to believe in Jesus by her own reason, or, by her own powers of deduction. No, by the power of the Holy Spirit working through God’s word, she was, as St. Paul says, “transferred from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom God’s beloved Son, in whom we have redemption the forgiveness of our sins.” The fact is, Holly was once comfortable with the darkness, but in time she was brought into the brightness of God’s redeeming love in Christ.
We are told in the Book of Acts that a man by the name of Saul of Tarsus was knocked to the ground and brought to faith in Jesus. He went on to be one of the greatest apostles of the early church, a man who wrote most of the books in the New Testament. We read about conversions like Paul’s and Holly’s and we’re struck by how mightily and powerfully the Holy Spirit worked in their lives. In doing so, however, we may wonder why, in our coming to faith in Jesus, we didn’t experience something as inspiring and as memorable as they did.
Paul’s story was amazing, as was Hollys. Perhaps it’s these stories and others like them, as well as the story of the first Pentecost, that leave us believing that we have some how missed something in our journey of faith with Jesus. Most of us, I would dare say, didn’t have a conversion experience like Hollys. Nor did we witness tongues of fire coming down from the heavens to touch us with faith. No, most of us came to faith in what we might call the ordinary way, the way most people do, either through the power of the Gospel, or through simply water and the word.
You were probably a little child when you were brought forward to the font of God’s grace. Perhaps it was this font. When your parents brought you forward in the church to be baptized, you might have been sound asleep, or, you might have been kicking and screaming. Either way, you were brought forward by faithful parents and here at the font, in front the whole church, some words were said and some water was poured over your head and that was it! You were “transferred from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of God’s beloved Son, in whom you have redemption, the forgiveness of your sins.” It was a miraculous moment in your life, but even to those who witnessed the transformation, it all seemed so ordinary, so simple.
God, of course, doesn’t work the miracle of conversion the same way in everyone’s life. He does, however, always work in a miraculous way, to bring us, who were dead in our trespasses and sins to life. It would seem that part of our desire to witness a miracle in our own lives, at least in regards to conversion and faith, is that we don’t really grasp what and who we were before God came to rescue us.
Paul, echoing the incident of the dry bones from the Book of Ezekiel, described who we were when we were brought to faith in Jesus. He says, “You were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.”
It was at the font of Holy Baptism that the Holy Spirit came to you through water and the word. Flames of fire, so to speak, descended from on high. God reached into time and space and He drew you out of “the darkness of this world and He transferred you into the kingdom of His Son.” As the apostle says elsewhere, “God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.” In your baptism, God adopted you as His own dear child. So now, all of the blessings of the cross and the resurrection of Jesus, namely, forgiveness, life and salvation are yours, and the Father says to you the same thing He said to His Son at His baptism. “You are My beloved son, you are My beloved daughter, in whom I am well pleased.” Your baptism was truly a miracle of God.
Such is the historic and orthodox view of the Church. Listen to how Irenaeus, a 2nd century Church Father, spoke of Holy Baptism. In speaking of an Old Testament incident where Naaman was healed of his leprosy by dipping seven times in the Jordan River, Irenaeus wrote, “'And (he) dipped himself,' says [the Scripture], 'seven times in Jordan.' It was not for nothing that Naaman of old, when suffering from leprosy, was purified upon his being baptized, but it served as an indication to us. For as we are lepers in sin, we are made clean, by means of the sacred water and the invocation of the Lord, from our old transgressions; being spiritually regenerated as new-born babes, even as the Lord has declared: 'Except a man be born again through water and the Spirit, he shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.'"
Today, on this Pentecost Sunday, we give thanks and praise to God for giving us His Spirit and, in doing so, for giving us what we could never attain on our own, namely life and salvation. “You were dead in the trespasses and sins..but God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.”
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
The peace of God that passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus unto life everlasting. Amen.
+ Soli Deo Gloria +