Sermon for Pentecost

This seems like a really short sermon for me, but here it is:


It is possible to argue that the birthday of the Church was not Pentecost, as we so often like to say, but rather, Easter.

I have argued that in the past, and I know some of you have heard it preached here before, that it was Easter that caused new life to come into the world, it was Easter that allowed a crucified Christ to become a risen Christ, it was Easter that took a frightened band of faithless followers and made them Apostles to the world. It was Easter that gave us a glimpse of just what salvation is, and just what the future holds for those who believe. And if those things don’t constitute the Church, the community of believers, the Body of Christ, I don’t know what does.

And maybe next year, I will go back to that argument, because I like it. Y’all know that Easter is a big deal for me. It’s THE big deal. Easter is the single most important event in the history of the universe, so it makes sense to me that it’s the thing that makes us who we are, and helps us be who we claim to be.

But today, I know that some of you will be relieved to hear, that I am going to argue the other side of the case, that it is in fact, Pentecost, which is the birthday of the Church.

I don’t know that you can say that the disciples gathered together in that upper room after Jesus’ ascension to heaven were the Church yet. They were the Church in waiting, what tradition has called the Church expectant. They knew they were going to have work to do, because Jesus had given them the commission to go out and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. But they weren’t doing that work yet. They were waiting and praying and excited.

They needed the Holy Spirit, and they couldn’t do what they were called to do without him. They were waiting for their Comforter, their Advocate, their inspiration. They were waiting for the power from heaven which would enable them to tell the world about the resurrection of Jesus, to declare to the world that Jesus is Lord and that he loves them.

They couldn’t be a Church unless they could do those things, and they couldn’t yet do those things.

One theologian wrote in a reflection on Pentecost that, “Our theology would improve if we thought more of the Church being given to the Spirit than of the Spirit being given to the Church.”1

I like that. I have said before that we should think not of inviting Christ to share our life, but of accepting Christ’s invitation to share in his life, and this seems to be the same kind of reversal. If we think of the Church not as a body that has received the Holy Spirit, but as a body that has been given to the Holy Spirit to do with what he will, our thinking changes.

The same theologian goes on to say, “we are in danger of perpetuating the irreverence of picturing God’s Spirit as a grant of superhuman power or guidance, like a fairy sword or magic mirror to equip us for our adventures. The promised power from on high is not of that kind at all. The primary effect of the Pentecostal experience was to fuse the individuals of that company into a fellowship which in the same moment was caught up into the life of the risen Lord.”

I like his insistence that the Holy Spirit is not just one more tool in our tool box for living the Christian life. Rather, we are one more tool in the Holy Spirit’s tool box…his primary means of telling the world the things God wants it to know…that God loves them, that Christ is risen, that death doesn’t get to win any more, that sin has lost its power, and that Jesus is Lord.

Those things are what the Church is for, what the Church does. Those things are why the Church was born on this day and given into the care of the Holy Spirit who would raise it with gentle nurturing and discipline and help it grow fully into the image of the risen Christ.

We’re not there yet. It may be our birthday, but we’re not grown-ups in the life of the Holy Spirit, and we still need his guidance and discipline. The New Testament makes it very clear that in order to be part of the Church, a believer has to be baptized into the Holy Spirit’s life, and the fact that we are part of his life is what makes us a Church.

That’s the difference between the Church and other organization that do good things. It’s the difference between the Church and the Rotary Club, for instance. The Church has the Holy Spirit—or, rather, the Holy Spirit has us, and in the Holy Spirit, we are called and strengthened to do what the Holy Spirit does—proclaim to the world that Christ is risen, and live a life that declares that Jesus is Lord.