Sermon by Keith Battarbee

Here is yesterday's sermon. I publish it with Keith's permission, he was our preacher yesterday :). Thank  you Keith!

2nd Reading Acts 2: 1–13 (The congregation were asked to stand, as this reading from Acts is every bit as important as any reading from the Gospels!]

On the day of Pentecost all the Lord's followers were together in one place. Suddenly there was a noise from heaven like the sound of a mighty wind! It filled the house where they were meeting. Then they saw what looked like fiery tongues moving in all directions, and a tongue came and settled on each person there. The Holy Spirit took control of everyone, and they began speaking whatever languages the Spirit let them speak. Many religious Jews from every country in the world were living in Jerusalem. And when they heard this noise, a crowd gathered. But they were surprised, because they were hearing everything in their own languages. They were excited and amazed, and said:

“Don't all these who are speaking come from Galilee? Then why can we hear them speaking our own languages? Some of us are from Parthia, Media, and Elam. Others are from Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia, Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt, Libya near Cyrene, Rome, Crete, and Arabia. Some of us were born Jews, and others of us have joined the Jewish religion. Yet we can all hear them using our own languages to tell the wonderful things God has done.”

Everyone was excited and confused, and they kept on asking each other: "What does all this mean?"

Others made fun of the Lord's followers and said, "They are drunk."

But Peter stood with the eleven apostles and spoke in a loud and clear voice to the crowd:

“Friends and everyone else living in Jerusalem, listen carefully to what I have to say! You are wrong to suggest that these people are drunk. After all, it is only nine o'clock in the morning. But this is what God had the prophet Joel say:

"When the last days come, I will give my Spirit to everyone. Your sons and daughters will prophesy. Your young men will see visions, and your old men will have dreams.

In those days I will give my Spirit to my servants, both men and women, and they will prophesy. I will work miracles in the sky above and wonders on the earth below.

Pentecost is the last chapter in the Incarnation Story

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TCIC [Turku Cathedral International Congregation] is a ‘liturgical’ church,

in contrast to many ‘evangelical’ churches

such as – especially relevant today! – the Pentecostalist churches;

and it is a ‘calendrical’ church, where we ‘map’ the whole narrative of Jesus’ life, the Incarnation Story, onto the church year.

Today is the ‘last chapter’ in that story: the final climax of Easter.

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This Pentecost story is a tricky or puzzling narrative: this baffling experience of languages fusing together, as it were: everyone could understand what the disciples were telling them: language barriers were eliminated;

but surely that’s a very relevant model for our congregation, coming as we do from so many countries, from many different Christian backgrounds and traditions, and speaking so many different languages!

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But then, the Incarnation Story as a whole is a difficult narrative: for example, like some modern novels, it plays tricks on the readers: makes you think you’ve come to the end, but then you haven’t.

When Jesus rode into Jerusalem on the donkey, that must have seemed to many of his disciples like the beginning of the glorious end they had been waiting for: the entry of the King into the Holy City, the salvation of Israel …

but then it turned out very differently: he was betrayed and arrested and tried and sentenced and executed: and that seemed like the end, a terrible one;

but then it turned out very differently: he returned – the grave couldn’t hold him – and that seemed like a different kind of end: baffling, but full of a new kind of hope;

but then, having come back and overcome death, he went away again: so that was another, baffling end;

but no, then comes Pentecost: yet another, very different kind of ending, not ‘about’ Jesus himself any more, but about us: in fact not so much an ending, but a beginning: the birth of the Church; so Pentecost is in a way the ‘birthday of the Church’

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In her sermon last week, Pastor Mia commented on how difficult it is to talk about the Holy Spirit. Yes, it is. In mainstream Christian belief, we speak of God as a Trinity of three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Part of the problem is the fact that the word person, or persona, has shifted in meaning a lot. In the language of the NT, it’s actually the word for ‘face’. But for two of those Persons of the Trinity, it’s relatively easy to put a face on them – even if that may be a misleading way of thinking about the Father, since it leads to all those images of God as ‘an old man with a beard’. And of course Jesus had a face: he4 was a human being! But what face can you put on the Holy Spirit?

In church art, we don’t usually use a faced image at all for the Spirit: we use other kinds of symbols, symbols which we find in the Bible: a wind, that moved over the face of the waters; or breath (that’s what the Greek word for the Spirit actually means) that came into the dry bones in Ezekiel’s vision; or light: when Moses had talked with God, on Mt Sinai or then later in the Tent of Meeting, his face ‘shone’; or the dove which came down on Jesus at his baptism; or fire; which is what we have in today’s story. And red, today’s liturgical colour, is the colour of fire.

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But when we talk about God having, as it were, three ‘faces’, what this is trying to describe (among other things) is that God interacts with us in three distinct ways.

As the Father, God is the Creator of our universe, the Ground of all Being as it was described by the German theologian Paul Tillich: the unimaginably powerful source of all energy and all matter and all cosmic order. (Not very adequately described, then, as an ‘old man with a beard’.)

As the Son, God is this incomprehensible power taking human form, being born as a baby and growing up as a man and dying a terrible death on the Cross, through which death we are offered atonement and forgiveness …

and as the Spirit: God is like an energy, which can interact with us and radically change our lives.

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This action of the Spirit is what we call ‘mercy’, or more precisely, ‘grace’.

In many languages, there is just one word for both of these ideas: armo, nåd, Gnade, Latin gratia … but in English (and perhaps in some other languages) we have two words. ‘Mercy’ is forgiveness for what we have done that was wrong. But ‘grace’ is the promise of God’s direct and personal interaction with each and every one of us, if we will allow God into our hearts. And we can do that, in part, by following what Jesus says in today’s Gospel reading: If you love me, you will do what I have said, and my Father will love you; … and I will ask the Father to send you the Holy Spirit who will help you and always be with you.

Note that it isn’t imposed on us. The disciples weren’t struck by lightning: they had said Yes to Jesus, Yes to God; and God responds at Pentecost by pouring the divine Yes into them.

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And it isn’t necessarily as dramatic as that first Christian Pentecost. I don’t think I know anyone who has personally been touched by tongues of fire, or who has experienced ‘speaking in tongues’. But in another sense – in the context of this our liturgical celebration of Pentecost, as an international, ecumenical, multilingual congregation – we do speak in tongues: and we even have, in our liturgy, one place where we are encouraged to do so: where we all join together to say the prayer that our Lord Jesus himself taught his disciples: the Lord’s Prayer, the ‘Our Father’. And so I would like to invite you all, especially today, when we come to that point, to join together boldly in saying our shared Christian prayer loud and strong in your own language. Don’t be pressured into the English, just because our liturgy is otherwise in English. In fact I will pray not in English but in the Greek, the oldest version that we have. Let us come before the Lord in all our rich many-tongued variety to ask for – and say Yes to – his blessing and the gift of his grace.

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Let me close with a prayer to the Holy Spirit which I like very much: a prayer which highlights how interactive the action of the Spirit is: for it is all about not just the action of God, but our own assent to that action: saying Yes to God, every day of our lives.

Spirit of God, shine in our hearts:

show us, and help us to see;

speak to us, and help us to hear;

teach us, and help us to understand;

guide us, and help us to listen;

lead us, and help us to follow.

We ask this in the Name of Jesus our risen Lord: Amen.

Sermon by Keith Battarbee