A sermon on Acts 2:1-21
It’s lovely to be here in such a beautifully decorated church today - and it’s particularly good for us to be here on Pentecost Sunday. Because Pentecost, as well as being a key Christian festival, finds its roots in Jewish worship and we read about it first in Deuteronomy 16. And Pentecost, within the Jewish faith, was a time when the people of God would come together to celebrate the harvest and a giving of the first fruits back to God.
Well, the Flower Festival isn’t harvest as such but it is a moment for us, as a community to pause and reflect on the beauty of God’s creation and his provision for us. The Flower Festival is a moment for us as a Church to offer back to God in worship what he has already given us in creation. God the Creator takes delight in our creativity. He made us to be creatives in his own image and he delights in what he sees this morning. This is his creation offered back to him in worship.
The Pentecost spirit is alive and well in our Flower Festival today.
And it’s good for us to spend some time reflecting on the Creator God, the God who gives, the God who sustains. Because Pentecost is a time for us to remember the coming of the Holy Spirit into our midst and remember the creative power of God at work within us as individuals and as a church.
So, in our reading, the disciples are together this Pentecost, ready to meet with God as they always had done. But things are different now and God uses this moment to fulfil his promise and send the Holy Spirit upon them. This Pentecost moment was a moment of fulfilment; a moment when the prophecies in Joel 2 came true, a moment when the promise of Jesus to send the Spirit came true, a moment when the promise of the renewal of the people of God is fulfilled. Pentecost is a time of fulfilment.
But it’s also true to say, as we reflect on this reading, that Pentecost is a celebration of the abundance of God too. At the heart of our faith is a recognition that God wants to give to us abundantly. In John 10:10, Jesus says, ‘I have come so that they may have life in abundance’. And here, in Acts 2, at Pentecost, we see that the verbs used are verbs of abundance, the descriptions are descriptions of excess. As someone once wrote, this is a passage of saturation. Let me just give you a few examples:
‘They were all together…’
‘The rush of a violent wind…’
‘Filled the entire house…’
‘All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit’
‘There were devout Jews from every nation living in Jerusalem’
‘The crowd gathered…’
‘All were amazed and perplexed…’
‘I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh’
‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved’
Throughout this passage, there is abundance, there is excess, there is saturation, there is an over-flowing of God into the experience of human beings and even into the experience of the whole created order. And in that moment of pure abundance, as the abundant Spirit falls upon them all, each and every person hears the Good News in their own language.
The abundance of God is ultimately personal. When the Spirit comes in abundance, he comes to you, he comes to me, and we receive him in our own language, which is to say, each according to our own need. Each one of us experiences the abundance of God as we need to in this moment.
And yet, despite the individualism of God’s Spirit, meeting each one of us in our need, there is a community response too. As God meets with you, as God meets with me, so a new community is born: a community of people who have been met by God and know what it is to bathe in his Spirit.
The reality is that we may all speak different languages; we may all experience God in different ways, we may all have a different picture of God, we may all encounter his Spirit differently. But the Spirit makes us all one community, joined in fellowship by our common experience of God. And so this Pentecost, as we are surrounded by the beauty of God’s creation, it is a time for us to celebrate the abundance of God poured out upon us.
It is a time to thank God for all that he has given us to enjoy in creation and in our lives too. And the theme of the Festival is ‘Take My Hands’. So, as we celebrate God’s abundant gifts to us, so we offer ourselves back to him to use us in his service however he deems fit. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12: “There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but the same God works all of them in all.”. The Spirit has made us one. So, as a church, we are called to celebrate diversity and yet live in unity. The language of God, expressed on the Day of Pentecost was a language of unity through diversity. There is one Lord, one Church, one Baptism but the Spirit comes to us in diverse ways and each of us hears the Good News according to our own language. And so we are called to use our diverse gifts in the service of God so that we can bring glory to his name.
It is God’s desire for a spirit of Pentecost to inhabit all churches, including our church here in Linton. A spirit of Pentecost that enters the walls of our church and blows amongst us, both settling on us and unsettling us. A spirit of Pentecost that helps us to celebrate all that God has given us and offer ourselves back in service to him in the power of the Holy Spirit. A spirit of Pentecost that will empower us and renew us and lead to the renewal of our community in Christ.
Our prayer for St. Mary’s is that we would become a Pentecost church, experiencing the coming of the Spirit of God, experiencing joy and hope, exhibiting love, celebrating difference, celebrating creativity, proclaiming the Good News of Christ in all we think and say and do.
Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on us we pray. Amen.
