When Pentecost & Memorial Day Converge
Acts 10
Memory is a gift from God. We love to retell the stories that we love most about our lives and our family or nation.
We build what we call memorials as monuments to the past. We choose to set up meaningful tokens of memory for events and persons who have impacted our lives.
Here we are on Memorial Day weekend celebrating the church's birthday while remembering those in our nation's history who lay down their lives for the American ideal of freedom.
There will be visits to monuments tomorrow, monuments set up to honor the fallen of all the wars that the United States has ever fought. Preparations are being made for the 155th Memorial Day celebration at Arlington National Cemetery where tomorrow at 11 AM, in one of our enduring traditions, the president will lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. This symbolic gesture reminds us of what Karen Durham-Aguilera, the executive director of the Office of Army Cemeteries said, "Every day at Arlington National Cemetery is Memorial Day." Memorial Day is one day that we focus on something that we should do every single day.
Memorial Day began as Decoration Day following the Civil War as Americans remembered those who had died and laid flowers at their graves. Following WWI, this day began to evolve into what we know today as Memorial Day. Tomorrow we will honor those who have laid down their lives for the ideal of freedom. We will take a moment to reflect, pray, offer thanks to God, and enjoy the freedom of living in a place where it is acknowledged that all men and women are created equal and that the Creator has given us certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We owe our gratitude to God and to those women and men who lay down their lives to protect that freedom that our great nation acknowledges we have been given by God.
This time of year is one where two different holidays converge. While we are celebrating Memorial Day on the American calendar, the church calendar invites us to remember another momentous event. Today is Pentecost Sunday, the day we celebrate the birthday of the church.
Pentecost was already a day of celebration for the nation of Israel. It was one of the feast days that Yahweh gave them to spend time reflecting, remembering, worshipping, and resting. God believes in rest! If you were to add up all the sabbaths and feast days that the Torah commanded ancient Israel to observe it would equal three months out of every year!
Pentecost was one of those days off. Pentecost, which means fifty, was observed by the Jews fifty days after Passover. It was at Passover that they remembered the way that the LORD had delivered them out of Egypt. They celebrated by eating lamb around a table where they retold the story. Jesus fulfilled the types of this story and as heaven's greatest Soldier lay down His Life as the Lamb of God. He rose again on Easter Sunday proving His ultimate victory over the greatest war to be fought for humanity's life, liberty, and happiness! After His resurrection, He spent forty days with His disciples speaking to them the things pertaining to the kingdom of God. He then ascended into heaven, but not before He told them to go to Jerusalem and wait for the Promise of the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit has always been working in the world. The Spirit of God is at the bookends of Scripture. Genesis 1 (Author's Paraphrase) reads:
"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was formless and empty. And the Spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters. And God said..."
Revelation 22:17 (NIV) sums it up:
"The Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” And let the one who hears say, “Come!” Let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who wishes take the free gift of the water of life."
The Holy Spirit begins creation and at the end along with the church invites everyone who will hear to enter the New Creation won by the memory of Heaven's Greatest Soldier, the Lord Jesus Christ!
Psalm 33:7-9 (NIV):
"By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, their starry host by the breath of his mouth. 7 He gathers the waters of the sea into jars; he puts the deep into storehouses. 8 Let all the earth fear the Lord; let all the people of the world revere him. 9 For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm."
Job 26:13 says, "By His Spirit He hath garnished the heavens; his hand hath formed the crooked serpent."
Psalm 104:30 (NIV), "When you send your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the ground..."
It is the Holy Spirit of God that is the very Breath of all creation. He continues to create and shape the world actively in every moment and every place. But, Jesus promised something more...
Throughout the history of the world and the OT, there were individuals who the Bible says the Spirit of God was in like Joseph and Ezekiel and Bezalel. There were others like Samson and Saul who the Spirit of the LORD came upon. The prophets spake as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. Even the pagan prophet Balaam was able to connect with the Spirit of God as God chose to speak through him on a few occasions. Moses had such a measure of God's Spirit upon His life that the LORD took from it and put it on 70 of the elders of Israel who prophesied. It was something only a select few in Israel or the world around them experienced in this way. Two of them went on prophesying in the camp of Israel. Joshua, Moses's protege, was upset that they might be taking Moses's job. Moses then made a statement that revealed the heart of God. He said, "I would that not only these, but all of God's people were prophets!" (Num 11:29).
When those select few people in the OT were filled with the Holy Spirit, they revealed a greater capacity of what humanity can be when in its proper environment. When God created fish, He spoke to the water. When God created the trees, He spoke to the earth. But, when God created humanity, He spoke to Himself (Gen 1:26). Humanity was made to be connected to the Spirit of God in a way that nothing else in creation is. The glory of God is a human fully alive! Humanity was not meant to live apart from the Spirit of God.
When Adam and his wife disobeyed God they were banished from the environment where they had free access to the Presence of God. They lived lives less than what God intended. When Jesus came, as the last Adam, and the Second Man, the Lord of Glory laid down His life in the age-old war in order to reconnect humanity with God. The prophets looked ahead to a day when this would happen. Joel said, "It shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh..." (Joel 2:28).
That is what Moses was talking about. That is what Jesus spent forty days talking to them about. The disciples went to Jerusalem as Jesus told them to. They spent time praying and waiting. Then when the day of Pentecost, fifty days after Passover, had fully come, they were all in one place with one accord, and suddenly a sound came from heaven as of rushing mighty wind and it filled all the house where they were sitting and there appeared unto them divided tongues like fire that sat upon each of them and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues (languages) as the Spirit gave them utterance (Acts 2:1-4).
Pentecost had come! The Jews used it as a day that commemorated the giving of the Law and the wheat harvest's end. But, God opened the windows of heaven and poured out a Blessing that could not be contained by a single person. There were 120, to begin with. Then 3,000 more! They were ALL filled with the Holy Spirit! (Acts 2)
For a long time early Christians were exclusively Jewish then one day the Lord did something sovereign. He used Saul of Tarsus's zeal for the Jewish religion to scatter the church. A deacon named Phillip began preaching the gospel to Samaritans, the Jews hated cousins. They believed and were baptized in Jesus's Name (Acts 8). When the apostles heard about it they went and laid hands on them and they too received the Holy Spirit, just like the day of Pentecost! The Lord was letting them know that the Blessing of the Holy Spirit was not just for the Jewish nation. Still, they didn't venture out.
Then about 24 years after Pentecost a soldier, who knew what war was like. A soldier who knew what it was like to participate in moments and days of memorial for those who had fallen was at prayer. He wasn't Jewish, but he served God to the best of his ability and knowledge. I'm so glad we serve a good God, Who is willing to meet us where we are! He is paying attention and He always has more for us, and He is not stingy. He wants everyone to have all that He has for them!
While Cornelius is praying the Lord sends an angel to him. God loves us just the way we are, but far too much to leave us that way. The angel makes a statement that stood out to me as I read the other day in preparation for today. He says, "Thy prayers and thine alms are come up for a memorial before God" (Acts 10:4 KJV). Just as we have Memorial Day, so does God. He is watching what we are doing and it matters. This soldier was about to have his own personal Pentecost because God was celebrating Memorial Day.
The word for "memorial" here is used two other times in the NT:
In the Gospels of Matthew and Mark Jesus says of the woman who anointed Him for his burial beforehand in her lavish act of worship washing his feet with tears and drying them with her hair, that wherever the gospel was preached in the whole world that what she had done would be spoken of as a "memorial."
In the Greek translation of the OT every time this word is used, it is connected to the offering of the portion of the OT sacrifices that the priest offered "as a memorial." The offerer was able to eat the largest portion of the sacrifice, but this portion was burnt up and became a sweet-smelling savor to the LORD. The angel tells Cornelius that he was doing something without knowing it, but the good life he was attempting to live, that only the priests in the OT could do! God met this soldier where he was, on God's Memorial Day and said, I've got more for you!
The angel told Cornelius to send for Simon Peter, the one who twenty-four years earlier had received the Baptism of the Spirit and preached to those on the Birthday of the church, at Pentecost. God had to first convince Peter that the gospel was for those who weren't Jewish. And then once Peter went to preach to this soldier's household the Holy Spirit fell on this soldier's household just like it had at Pentecost! They all spoke in other tongues!
Happy Birthday to the church on this Memorial Day weekend! The Baptism of the Holy Spirit is the inheritance of every believer in Jesus.
