Introduction
Yesterday morning, we held a coffee morning at Broomfield. We wanted to support
our missionary charity for the year, the Mission
Aviation Fellowship. You could make paper aeroplanes, take them to the
balcony and throw them in the direction of the communion table. Whoever got
their paper plane the nearest to the front would win a prize.
Mark, our three-year-old, got into the spirit of it,
especially after someone took him to a table and made him a paper plane. Then he
said, “Daddy, I want to play aeroplanes!”
I knew what that meant: with his hands, he would hold my
hands. Then he would run around me faster and faster, and would lift off. I whizzed
him around, and he flew with great joy and abandon. I put him down, and he
laughed. As I stood there dizzy, everybody laughed at me. Jim said, “Quick, get
a camera. I want a picture of the minister looking inebriated!”
“They are filled with new wine,” sneered the cynics at
Pentecost, witnessing the disciples who had been filled not with spirits but
the Holy Spirit.
It’s easy on Pentecost Sunday to be hung up on the
particular manifestations of the Holy Spirit described in Acts 2. Depending on
your personality or your style of faith, you may either loathe or love the
violent wind from heaven, the tongues of fire and the speaking in other
languages. In other sermons and articles, I have examined these things, but
today I want to concentrate on what Pentecost means.
1. After Easter
Pentecost was called so, because it was the fiftieth day after Passover in the
Jewish calendar. For Christians, it therefore comes after Easter. You may think
I have plumbed new depths in stating the obvious, but there is something
important here. Some Christians would like to stop with the joy of Easter
morning, but our journey must also take us through Ascension to Pentecost. As
Ben Witherington III says,
Throughout Acts, the presence of the Spirit is seen as the
distinguishing mark of Christianity – it is what makes a person a Christian.[1]
It isn’t just the question of speaking in tongues, it’s more
fundamental. The Holy Spirit enables us to confess Jesus as Lord[2].
Hence, Peter quotes Joel here:
Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.
(Verse 21)
The Holy Spirit shows us who Jesus truly is. The Spirit shows
how sinful we are and us how wonderful Jesus is. But the Spirit’s work doesn’t
stop there. The Holy Spirit shows us our need of God’s grace, and reveals to us
the saving work of Jesus in his Cross and Resurrection. Believing savingly in
the Easter events requires the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives. To see the
glory of Jesus and worship the Father through him means we need the Holy
Spirit. Neither worship nor evangelism are fundamentally human activities: we
need the Spirit to be at work in order for them to happen.
That’s to put it a challenging way. More positively, if you
have met Jesus, found the forgiveness of sins in his name through the Cross,
begun following him as a disciple and worshipping him as Lord, then the Holy
Spirit must have been at work in your life.
So, assuming we care about worship and evangelism as
Christians, we need to embrace a post-Easter faith, a Pentecost faith. It is a
faith that says, ‘Come, Holy Spirit. Be more at work in us, through us, ahead
of us and beyond us.’ Pentecost faith like that is grateful for all the past
signs of the Spirit’s work, but is hungry and thirsty for more.
2. Harvest
We have a lot of fun at Hatfield Peverel at harvest-time. As well as the Sunday
service and bringing offerings for good causes such as Harvest For The Hungry, we
have our Harvest Supper and Auction. The produce that cannot be given away is
auctioned off, and the proceeds given to our cause for the year. We have great
fun bidding against each other for tins of soup, home made jam and everything
else. Last year, Liz Ward and I enjoyed a ridiculous bidding war against each
other for a pineapple.
Now why am I talking about harvest in May? Well, our Jewish
friends so enjoyed their festivals and celebrations that they had two harvest festivals each year. One was
equivalent to our regular harvest festivals. It was the ingathering of the
crops at the end of the summer. But they also celebrated the arrival in late
Spring of the first fruits. They did this at Pentecost, or to give it its more
Jewish name, the Feast of Weeks, that happened seven weeks after Passover.[3]
Spiritually speaking, we look forward to the great
ingathering harvest at the end of the age, but we have plenty to celebrate in
the meantime. We have our spiritual first fruits. The gift of the Holy Spirit
is the first fruits of God’s harvest. The Spirit is the sign that shows us what
is coming. The Spirit is the first instalment of God’s kingdom in our lives. Here
is the foretaste of all that is to come.
Paul has a similar analogy in two of his letters, where he
describes the Holy Spirit as like a deposit[4].
Just as we pay a deposit on an item, intending to pay the remaining balance, so
the Holy Spirit is God’s initial deposit on us. He has begun his work of
salvation, and – as Paul says in Philippians – he will complete it[5].
If you think of the old Magnus Magnusson catchphrase from Mastermind, “I’ve
started, so I’ll finish”, the gift of the Spirit is God’s promise that he has
started his work in our lives, and he will finish.
So do you see the signs that the Holy Spirit is at work in
your life? Has the Spirit led you to saving faith in Christ? Does the Spirit increase
your vision of Jesus and your love for him, so that you want to worship God and
share God’s love? Is the Holy Spirit slowly making you more like Jesus, even if
you know there are still too many ways in which you are not like him? Does the
Spirit give you the courage and the words to be faithful to Christ under
pressure? If so, these are the first fruits of God’s harvest in you. One day it
will all come to complete fruition. These signs are the deposit God is putting
on your life. One day God will complete it.
3. Law
Like many homes, a weekday morning is frantic in ours, even though I work from
home. Getting one child ready for school and another for pre-school is a mad
rush. It is made even more so by the fact that Rebekah is a dreamer and that
ten minutes before we are due to leave, she and Mark know that their favourite
TV programme starts. Yes, it’s their Spanish language course. (Otherwise known
as Dora The Explorer.)
We are one of the closest families to the school; we are usually one of the
last to arrive. At points of great frustration, we tell Rebekah that if she is
late for school, a police officer will come and tell Mum and Dad off. We have
to try some way of scaring her into obedience! We pull out the same ‘policeman’
line in the car, if she doesn’t want to put on her seat belt or she dares us to
drive too fast.
We are used to ‘law’ as a list of rules, with some enforcers.
There was an ancient Jewish tradition that also associated Pentecost with the
giving of the Law at Sinai. And the Jewish writer Philo, who predates Luke,
wrote:
Then from the midst of the fire that streamed from heaven
there sounded forth to their utter amazement a voice, for the flame became the
articulate speech in the language familiar to the audience.[6]
It makes Sinai – where the Law was given – sound very much
like Acts 2. Pentecost is the Law of the Spirit, rather than the letter of the
Law. Pentecost fulfils Jeremiah’s vision of God’s new covenant, where God will
not write his law on tablets of stone, but inside the hearts of his people[7].
It is what Paul (again!) talked about when he wrote to the
Galatians in his famous words about the fruit of the Spirit. He tells his
readers that if they live by the Spirit, they will not spend their time
gratifying the full range of sinful desires, from immorality to the occult to
rage, envy and drunkenness. The Spirit, however, produces fruit: love, joy,
peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
And his punch line? ‘There is no law against such things.’ Furthermore, ‘If we live
by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.’[8]
In other words, if you want to please God and fulfil his
law, the Holy Spirit enables you to do so. It isn’t just about following a set
of rules, but becoming the kind of person God wants to be. The law of the Spirit
isn’t just about outward compliance, but inner transformation. When we try to
keep the rules in our own strength, we fail miserably, and fall back into
self-centredness. However, Pentecost brings the gift of the Spirit, God’s new
law. Not only does the Spirit lead us to the actions that please God, the Spirit
also enables to do that will of God and bring pleasure to God. If we want to
please God, we need to be open to the Holy Spirit.
Conclusion
I hope the things I’ve described about Pentecost are things for which we all
long in our lives as disciples of Jesus. I hope we long for a post-Easter
Pentecost faith, where the Holy Spirit is always enabling us to respond to
Jesus in repentance, worship and witness. I hope we also have a ‘first fruits’
faith, in which we can see signs of the Spirit’s work, but long for more,
before the final harvest. And I hope we have a love for God’s law that goes
beyond outward conformity to inward renewal, depending on the power of the
Spirit, not our own feebleness, to enjoy pleasing God.
But what to do about it? It’s easy to preach a sermon about
this and leave people feeling condemned. ‘You’re not doing enough of x, you
should do more of y.’ Here’s an alternative way of approaching it.
I came downstairs the other day, and could hear a noise. “Is
the tap running?” I asked Debbie. Sure enough, in the downstairs loo, the cold
tap hadn’t been turned off. Mark can wash his hands after going to the toilet,
but he struggles to turn off some of our taps. If he’s also managed to put the
plug in, the overflow saves us from disaster.
All the blessings of Pentecost are about the overflow of the
Spirit – the rivers of living water flowing from us to others. The disciples
don’t speak in tongues to the crowd:
the crowd overhears. It is an overflow. Pentecost is not the time to beat
ourselves up about our failures. It is the time to seek an overflow of the
Spirit, for then all the other things come as a natural consequence.
This Pentecost, let us ask God to soak us with the Holy Spirit
– not for the sake of spiritual self-gratification, such an ambition is a
contradiction in terms. But let us rather ask God to saturate us with the
Spirit so that we may more truly be worshippers, witnesses, holy people and all
the other things he longs for us to be.
Big Circumstance 
What Do You Think?