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| The Descent of the Holy Spirit, by Anthony Van Dyck |
Preached at St. John’s Lancaster, 27 May 2012
Acts2:1-21
Psalm 104
Romans 8:22-27
John 15:26-16:15
May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. AMEN.
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| The Logo of Shriners International |
Friday night Danny Meenach, Pete Martin, David Mowrey, and I donned our rhinestone encrusted red fezzes and descended on the main entrance of Wal-Mart to solicit donations for the Shriner’s Orthopedic and Burn Hospitals for Children. It is a worthy charity, and the “people of Wal-Mart” gave generously. Many of them did not appear to have a lot of extra cash, and their donations of one or two or five dollars reminded me of that widow whom Jesus commended for giving her two mites. “Because she has given all that she has, she has given more than all of them.” There was a time when I used to watch people a lot. And then time and circumstance limited that past-time, and so my three and a half hours at Wal-Mart provided a welcome opportunity to watch people again. I was a bit disturbed by what I saw. There were more people in the general population who seemed to be burned out on drugs than I had remembered. In the same way, there was a higher concentration of people who seemed to suffer from the ill affects of poverty than I had remembered from the days when I did most of my people watching in Lexington, Kentucky back in the 70’s. If the eye is the window of the soul, and I believe it is for most of us, I think it is safe to say that many of the people I saw were living in that shadowy land between faith and hope, where uncertainty and hurt can so easily lead to distrust and despair.
Perhaps you have visited that land at some point in your life. You believe that there is a God, a God who loves you. Your faith has led you to respond by giving your life to Him and calling out for his deliverance, but as hours blend into days and days into weeks, your prayers seem to go unanswered, and your soul wavers. The hope you had entertained seems so far away, and your loved one still suffers from cancer, and that person you love so dearly seems as unresponsive as ever, and you watch your balances dwindle as markets fluxuate and you are forced to draw down more and more capital to meet your regular expenses. Your faith is intact, but hope seems an unrealized dream.
Whitsunday, more commonly called the Feast of Pentecost, is the festival of our Holy Mother the Church which addresses the discouragement of that in-between land perhaps better than any other. It relates the historic fulfillment of the outpouring of the Blessed Holy Spirit in the lives of the early Christians. Jesus had ascended into heaven, and had told the disciples to go into the city and wait for the fulfillment of that which had been foretold by the prophets, the coming of the Spirit upon the people of God. He had said, “When the Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it unto you. All that the Father has in mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” (John 16:13-15)
And now, the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Holy and Blessed Trinity, is come into the world to guide the Ecclesia, the Church of God, into all truth. He fell upon them in power that day, and the world has never been the same. Common lives were filled with a confidence beyond what they had ever known. In many ways their situations did not change, but they were now aware of the infilling of God, and their transformed perceptions led to new outlooks, new callings, and new realities of faith and experience. They bore witness to the fact that Jesus Christ had defeated death and the grave, and had changed their lives forever. The boldness of their insistence led to persecution and radical transformation of culture, of institutions, and of lives. All of this because the Gift of the Holy Ghost had come upon them just as the prophets foretold. “For I will take you from among the heathen, and gather you out of all countries, and will bring you into your own land. Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you. A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them. And ye shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers; and ye shall be my people, and I shall be your God.” (Ezekiel 36:24-28) Because the gift of the Holy Spirit was theirs, their outlooks and their realities were transformed. The grayness of that in-between land gave way to the Technicolor certainty of the realized hope of the kingdom of God in their lives.
Have you experienced this ushering in of the Kingdom of God? Certainly it is a reality in the history of the Church, but have you known it in your own heart? Has His Spirit borne witness with your own spirit that indeed you are a child of God, and a joint heir with Jesus Christ? Has the grayness and uncertainty of life’s reality been reinterpreted and understood in that new light, that fuller truth and understanding which is the gift of God to all who believe?
On this feast of the coming of the Holy Spirit to the Church, I urge you to receive those gifts that God has prepared for you, and which Jesus promised were ours if we would wait for the fulfillment. By coming today to this holy place to receive the sacrament of the body and blood of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, you have in a very real way gone into the city to await the coming of the gift. You have believed that Jesus is the Christ, the one who did what the Bible says he did, and is who the Bible says he is. You have come to this place in faith, believing in the promise. Now I urge you to cast yourself upon his grace and mercy, praying earnestly that on this day, you might know that truth which He has promised. On this day, pray earnestly to him that the faith of the Church might be your own, and that the experience of the Church my be known in your life with power, and intimacy, and transforming reality.
God may change your immediate situation. It is much more likely that your situation will stay the same, but that he will transform your mind and your outlook. The miracle, you see, may not be in the physical healing, or the changed reality. It may be in that spiritual understanding which comes from what Wesley and others have called “the heart strangely warmed.” When we know beyond any shadow of a doubt that we have been with God, and that He loves us, we are guided into that deeper truth which only comes from knowing Him, for the Spirit of God speaks to us that which the Father has delivered to the Son. Jesus said, “I no longer call you servants, for the servant does not know what his lord does. But I call you friends, for all things that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.” Friends of Jesus, receive today that truth, that understanding, that knowledge that our Lord and our Saviour, our brother and our friend offers us through the coming of the Holy Spirit into the world. As it transformed the Empire of Rome, so will it transform our outlooks and our reality, and men and women everywhere will know the reality of the power of God’s love. In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. AMEN.
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