Pentecost Sermon 2024

May 19, 2024

By Kristin Berkey-Abbott


Pentecost Sermon

• First reading
  • Acts 2:1-21
• Psalm
  • Psalm 104:24-34, 35b
• Second reading
  • Romans 8:22-27
• Gospel
  • John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15

Pentecost is the 3rd great festival of the Church, and as most of us know, the other two festivals are Easter and Christmas. Pentecost has been the overlooked festival, in most of our churches. It never slips by without notice, but it’s not a church festival that comes with traditions that we anticipate for months. We don’t have gift giving traditions or special foods—at least most of us don’t. We don’t necessarily go out of our way to get together with far flung family members. We don’t have time off.

For all these reasons, we may assume that Pentecost isn’t the most important of the Church holidays. But consider what we are celebrating. At Christmas, we celebrate the incarnation, God coming to live with us, alongside us, or, as The Message version of the Bible says, “Moving into the neighborhood.” But as a specific person during a specific time, God can only be with a few of us at a time. Pentecost celebrates a new possibility, a way that God can be with all of us, all at the same time, all part of a large community.

When we think of Pentecost, we may think of it as the beginning of the Church, where the Holy Spirit takes control and those hapless disciples are transformed. The Church spreads far and wide, despite the differences in cultures, language, and beliefs. Books have been written dissecting all the reasons for the success of Christianity. Even more books have been written explaining to us modern disciples how we, too, could harness the power of the Holy Spirit, if we just believed enough. We may have been told about how the book of Acts is called the book of Acts, not the book of waiting, not the book of sitting on the sofa, so we, too, should go out and act.

As I read the texts for this week, I’m struck by how differently people experience the Holy Spirit are in today’s collection of texts. I had a similar reaction during my 9 months of Systematic Theology class, a sense of wonder about the different ways that we understand the different aspects of the Triune God. Today, we focus on the Holy Spirit.

Our reading from Acts ( Acts 2:1-21) is a traditional understanding of the Holy Spirit. There’s wind, tongues of fire, the ability to speak in languages previously unknown. It’s a reading that shows us that the arrival of the Holy Spirit can be more chaos than comfort. This chaos may explain why the Church has focused on the other two big holidays, Christmas and Easter, and not focused on Pentecost. Our reading from Acts shows us that the Holy Spirit loose and moving in the world can be both transformative and scary, putting us on a collision course with people who like the status quo. But that’s not the only depiction of the Holy Spirit that we have, even if it’s the one we hear most about.

In the Gospel of John, the arrival of the Holy Spirit is a much more intimate happening. In the twentieth chapter, Jesus breathes on the disciples, and that’s how they receive the Holy Spirit. In today’s reading, which is a few verses earlier, before the crucifixion and resurrection, Jesus tells the disciples what to expect. It’s a comforting kind of relationship, a way to move beyond the grieving that comes with the loss of Jesus and his physical presence. Jesus talks about the Holy Spirit as a guide, the one who will lead us to the Truth.

From there, if we didn’t know the complexities of the story, we might assume that everything ends happily ever after. Jesus rises from the dead, showing that God doesn’t have to be constrained by the powers and principalities of our current world. Jesus gets to go to Heaven and the Holy Spirit stays behind to lead us all to Truth and having the right words to say. We may assume that we’ll be like Peter, with the courage to confront those who were besmirching the disciples when they spoke in different languages.

But what about those days when we don’t have that courage? How do we keep going when we don’t have visions to sustain us? It’s in the reading from Romans that we get a Pentecost message that feels most life affirming to me in our current day and time. Here we have an image of the Holy Spirit praying the prayers that we do not know how to pray.

I don’t always feel like Paul’s letters are written for those of us in the twenty-first century, and indeed, they were not. Paul was writing to specific groups of believers about specific local problems. But what makes his writing continue to be relevant is the way that he captures the human condition. This week, I’ve been thinking about creation groaning in labor pains. Creation groans, and we groan. We have hope in that which we have not yet seen. But it can be tough, these times of pain and hope.

 

We have to remind ourselves that we are not the Messiah, that we do not have all the answers. We may not even be asking the right questions. In these times, when we’re not sure what to pray, how to pray, it’s a comfort to think of the Holy Spirit as a kind of intercessor.

Our reading from Psalms reminds us of the larger picture. Humans have a tendency to get snarled up in any number of ways, and most of them won’t matter when we’re dead. They don’t even matter now. Like so many of the Psalms, our Psalm for today, reminds us of the glory of God’s creation, of how humans are just a part of that glory, and often a small part. Here we see the Holy Spirit as a co-creator, working with God to renew the face of the earth. In this Psalm, we’re reminded that we are not the ones in charge. I touch the mountains, my own little piece of them, and nothing happens. God touches the mountains, and they smoke. The open hand of God fills us all with good things—not only humans, but all of creation. The Holy Spirit working in the larger cosmos is a much larger manifestation of the Holy Spirit that the disciples experience as tongues of flame and rushing wind.

Pentecost is a more varied festival than I had been trained to expect. We’ve got Holy Spirit as life giving force in the Psalm, Holy Spirit as transformative force in Acts, and the Holy Spirit as a comforter and a coach in John. And when we don’t know what to do with all of this, Paul promises that the Holy Spirit will intercede for us, will pray the words that we can’t quite figure out.

The future of this new creation doesn’t depend on us having the right words or the right answers. Thank God for that.