Some Pentecostal thoughts

I will be preaching this coming Sunday for a group of churches who will meet on Pentecost Sunday. I thought to share a few thoughts which will form some of the basis for my sermon. The principal text is the story found in Acts chapter 2.

When, as the story relates,  the Spirit of God came upon a gathering of people who had begun to follow Jesus, the Spirit was not entering foreign territory.

We are all familiar with the idea of an invasion. We are seeing it every day on our television screens: the Israeli action in Palestine, the Russian movement Ukraine, and many more examples. Invasion is the violation of someone’s home, someone’s place and identity and belonging.
And all too easily, elements of this way of thinking creep into our theology: in fact they are welcomed my many of ours songs and ideas.
We ask Jesus or the Lord or the Spirit to come into our lives and take over. An old hymn speaks of ‘none of self and all of thee’‑‑as if what God wants is to take us over, do away with who we are and make us into something else.

Actually the New Testament insists that when Jesus came to us as a human person, he came as one of us. John puts it that he came to his own place, his home, even if his own people did not recognize him. He was not a stranger. He came to his own place. He was not invading, and neither does the Spirit come to foreign territory.

From the beginning, human beings are brought to life by the breath or spirit that God breathed into them. The Psalmist says that we live by God’s spirit and when it is withdrawn, then indeed we are no more.
We are, all of us, alive in the presence of God (whether we know it or not). This world is God’s good creation, for all its anguish and wickedness and struggle, it remains God’s good creation.

So what does it mean to say that God’s Spirit comes upon a whole bunch of people, and what might that mean for us?

First, the story in Acts reminds us that this was a long dreamed-of reality: and the prophesy of Joel is especially significant, as in such a structured and patriarchal society, controlled by men, especially old men, the promise is that God’s Spirit will come upon all flesh (not just a privileged few, not those who disdain their bodies, to become holy), but all flesh, and their sons and their daughters will prophesy, or preach that means, and both their young and old will have visions and hopes and dreams, for a good world, a beautiful and peaceful life.
God wants to do this, for all people‑‑because they (we) are all God’s children.

And we read there too that the people were able to respond, not in gobbledegook, not in strange sounds, but in fact every person heard the witness of the Spirit in their own language. The crowd, you see, was made up of people gathered from all over, the diaspora of Jews who had long since left this land, but now they have gathered in Jerusalem for an annual festival, swelling the population, and the text mentions some of the places these people had come from: and every one of them hears in their own language. Again, the Spirit does not insist they learn some foreign language in order to become Christian, or acceptable to God.

When the Spirit of God came, and comes, God is not entering foreign territory. Rather, God’s purpose is to help us to learn to be at home: here and now, with each other and with God.
So it is that when the Apostle Paul writes about this in that wonderful chapter, Romans 8, he says this:

For all who are led by the Spirit are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, ‘Abba! Father! it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. (Rom. 8. 14 – 17a).

And when Paul prays for these Christians in Ephesians 3, he prays that they may be strengthened in their inner being  with power through God’s Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in their hearts. (Eph. 3. 16, 17.)

The Spirit of God comes to help us to know, with a deep and wonderful hope and joy, that we are already in God’s home: to be heirs is to live into the provision and promise of our creator.
And to be alive in the household of God, living according to the life of the Spirit, is to discover that not only are we given this life, as a separate and special mob, but we have sisters and brothers in places and ways we did not imagine.

For when the Spirit of God leads us, wherever that is, again we are not entering foreign territory. We are invited to discover and learn that we are at home.