“Every Day is Pentecost”
Acts 2:1-21
The Book of Acts is the story of the early Church and how it evolved.
It’s an amazingly exciting adventure.
And in it we get a very intriguing picture of a group of people—folks just like you and me—who are continually being changed and formed and transformed in their understanding of God.
And one of the things that stands out most is that even though the Church is born on Pentecost, the Church is not finished on Pentecost.
It is a work of God, always under construction—all the way to today.
Even though the first disciples may have been able to preach truth about Jesus with boldness and in the power of the Holy Spirit, that didn’t mean that they understood everything there is to know about the God Who created this infinite universe.
They knew some basics.
If they had been able to comprehend everything at once—it would have been just too much.
How could they?
Remember from Last week Apostle Paul says in 1st Corinthians 13: “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child…
…Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face.
Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”
For those of you who have been Christians for a long time, how many of you have the exact same understanding of God that you did say, 10, 20, 30 years ago?
It’s always changing, isn’t it?
It’s growing, it’s moving, it’s fluid.
And it’s not that God changes, it just that our understanding of God and God’s ways change and develop the more and longer we live in Him.
And that’s because the gift of salvation—the Gift of God’s Holy Spirit is an ongoing gift, it’s not just a one-time event, and the Church is constantly changing according to the Spirit’s leading.
Even on the very first day of the Church something amazing happens.
There is a radical social equality for those who receive God’s Spirit.
Everyone is on the same footing—the old, the young, women, men, slaves and free people, the rich and the poor—they all receive the power of God to prophesy, see visions and dream dreams.
And all these different characters come together to form one Church where, as we are told in Acts 2:44-46:
They were all “together and had everything in common.
Selling their possessions and goods, they gave anyone as he [or she] had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts.
They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God…”
And, of course, as the story continues, they were eventually persecuted and scattered.
But all this did was to make them grow faster.
After they scatter, one of the early Apostles, Phillip, meets an Ethiopian eunuch.
And the Holy Spirit tells Philip to go and speak to the Eunuch.
The Eunuch becomes a believer and asks Philip, “Why shouldn’t I be baptized?”
And they stop his chariot, and go down into the water and Philip baptizes him.
And a Gentile joins the Church and he is a castrated male at that.
Another time, Peter stays at the home of a Roman Centurion named Cornelius.
While at his house, Peter has a vision where he sees “heaven opened and something like a large sheet being let down to earth by its four corners.”
It contained all kinds of animals and creatures that had always been considered to be unclean and forbidden by God to eat.
But a voice from heaven tells Peter, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.
Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.”
And thus, the Jewish dietary Laws become null and void.
During this same stay, Peter preaches the Gospel of Christ to large gathering of non-Jewish people.
And Peter proclaims, “You are well aware that it is against our law for a Jew to associate with a Gentile or visit him.
But God has shown me that I should not call any man impure or unclean.”
This was brand new stuff that Peter and the early Church were learning little by little, bit by bit.
This was radical.
It went against everything they had ever been taught about God and how they were to relate to other people—people who looked differently from them, acted differently, ate differently, thought differently, believed differently, behaved differently.
Their understanding of God was evolving bit by bit, day by day, little by little.
And it took a long time for the church to embrace these changes.
And many of us are still wrestling with some of the same issues to this very day.
The Church is always a work in progress.
It is always under construction, changing, growing, moving according to the leading of the Spirit.
What new things is the Holy Spirit teaching you about God and how you are to relate to others, to those who are different?
Peter received a lot of criticism from the other apostles and believers throughout Judea when they heard what he had done.
It was scandalous.
So scandalous that Peter had to go to Jerusalem, the home base of the early Church and explain himself to those who were saying: “You went into the house of uncircumcised men and ate with them”???!!!
Change is difficult.
It’s not easy to rid ourselves of old prejudices and ways of thinking—especially if these ways of thinking have been ingrained into us since we were young.
God is a VERY BIG GOD.
And sometimes, I make Him too small.
I try and create God in my image rather than the other way around.
How about you?
I lay on God my small thinking, my worldview, my idiosyncrasies, and when I do that, I pass those ideas on to others.
And in Acts, we are able to see a group of believers, people just like us, who make mistakes in their understanding of God and eventually change their thinking.
Some, though, do not change their thinking.
And they are the ones who tend to get in the way of the progress of God’s Church and God’s plans.
They are the ones to whom the Apostle Paul kept admonishing and trying to persuade through his many letters which are recorded in the New Testament.
“It is for freedom that Christ has set us free,” Paul tells the Church in Galatia, “do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery…”
…he continues, “The entire law is summed up in a single command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”
I’m still trying to figure out exactly what that means, how about you?
A friend of mine recently said, “You know what makes Christianity different from all the other religions?
Christianity is about loving God by loving other people.
That’s it.
When we are actively loving and serving other human beings we are actively loving and serving God.”
“Whenever you have done it for the least of these, you have done it for me…”
On the day of Pentecost there were staying in Jerusalem, people from every nation under heaven.
When the Holy Spirit filled Jesus’ first followers, they began to speak in other tongues which means languages as the Spirit enabled them.
“A crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard them speaking in his own language.”
“Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs.”
Pentecost was the inbreaking of God’s purposes for all of us; bringing people together despite our differences, and it still is…
Whenever and wherever the Church is open to the rush of the Holy Spirit; God is making changes in the way we see ourselves, one another and ultimately—God!
And so, in a very real sense, every day can be Pentecost for this Church as we continue to broaden our understanding of God’s love and put that understanding into practice.
May it be so.
Happy Pentecost!
Amen.
