Sermon for the Feast of Pentecost
3 June 2001
Preached at St John the Evangelist, Cold Lake
Acts 2:1-21
Romans 8:14-17
John 14:8-27
Psalm 104:24-35
How Good is Good Enough?
What a wonderful day to raise our voices in praise of the Most High God on the Day of Pentecost. It is this day that we commemorate the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples in Jerusalem, and the start of their ministry acting as witnesses for Jesus – essentially the birth of our Christian church. What a heady time to have been a disciple! – to have gone through the deep and complete sorrow and the desolation of the days immediately after His crucifixion, thence to see Him appear several times and to hear Him teach again, only to see Him leave during the Ascension, telling them ‘You must wait for the promise made by my Father…but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit’ (Acts 1) As with many of His teachings, this must have seemed very confusing to them, but just a few days later we hear the account that ‘…there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind…Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.’ (Acts 2)
After this point, the ministry of the apostles began in earnest. At that first sermon in the Spirit, given by Saint Peter, Acts tells us that 3000 people accepted Christ as their saviour – 3000 people. What is especially wonderful is that this evangelizing was carried out by Saint Peter, the one who always had the answer, even a few days before: ‘It doesn’t matter what these others do Lord, I will never leave you, and I will fight and die for you!’ and who then denied his Lord three times. What happened to Peter to make him such a powerful minister?
This book of the New Testament, the Acts of the Apostles, would more accurately be called the Book of the Holy Spirit acting through the Apostles. What are we by ourselves? I spend much of my days debating issues with people, presenting arguments and facts, attempting to win others over to my point of view. This works well with my job, but when I have tried to use this same logic to explain my belief in Christ I meet with no success at all. People counter my arguments to my great frustration, and just don’t seem to get it…but then I am forgetting what happens when I trust only in myself. The reason I fail in evangelising is because I am trying to rely on my own intellect and charisma to make the point – and compared to God’s intellect, I am only a little bitty corn flake, to quote Veggie tales.
In the Gospel we hear that ‘If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you forever.’ (John 14:15). The Greek word that is translated here as advocate is shown elsewhere as Helper, Comforter and Counsellor. It means ‘one who stands alongside’. You can understand now why Peter had become such an effective voice for the Lord. This was the Lord’s gift to the universal church after Christ left until his coming again in Glory – a helper who would be with us all, always. When he was on Earth, even Christ could only be in one place at a time, so this wonderful gift ensured that all believers would have God’s presence with them always.
On the day of Pentecost, the Holy Trinity is fully revealed for the first time. No longer would believers have to follow Christ in the crowd, grasping for only the hem of his robe to be healed. Now anyone who professed that Christ is Lord has the entire kingdom open before them. With the coming of the Holy Spirit Christ’s church militant has entered into the end times, awaiting the final resolution of the kingdom. As Christ said to Philip in today’s gospel, ‘Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me. Whoever has seen me has seen the Father…Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me.’ The trinity is revealed, and the gift of the holy Spirit is left with us until the end of this era.
Are we starting each day off, alive in the Spirit, and allowing Him to direct our days? Today, the Holy Spirit is every bit as alive as that day in Jerusalem, able to consecrate us in service to the Lord. In the prayer of consecration in the Mass, the Priest calls on the Holy Spirit to transform the physical symbols of bread and wine into a sacrament – an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace, given to us by Christ himself for all time. As believers we are called to consecrate ourselves through the indwelling presence of the Holy Ghost. This consecration creates in us a personal sacramental space – our physical selves become the outward and visible sign, and the indwelling Spirit becomes the inward and spiritual grace.
What hinders us in this consecration? Many times, and particularly in our world today, we demand proof. We want to see the survey results that say ‘the Holy Spirit is in you…and this survey is 90% accurate 9 times out of 10 (whatever that means).’ We want to hear a noted writer explain the facts of belief…when the truth is that hardly anyone comes to God through belief in the facts first. Just ask C.S. Lewis.
Recently I received an email from a friend who had moved away. She and her husband both consider themselves to be Catholics, and have had both children baptized, and attend church at least once per year whether they need it or not. Listen to what she writes:
“I believe Jesus must have been born, how? by a man and a woman of good standing in their community. I believe he was a ‘one of a kind’ kind of guy...a notable fellow in his day. I believe he was sentenced to a cross death why not, as that was a common way of killing those different from others...As for the resurrection??? well, I truly question that part of the story....as there are many other possible answers. I believe his spirit lived on....in stories, with people who knew him and were close, who believed in what he had to say…I cannot say I do fully. Why? Because I have too many unanswerable questions. Questions that people have been asking for a couple 1000 years with still no finite answer.”
Questions that people have been asking for a couple of thousand years with still no finite answer…n o f i n i t e a n s w e r.
Now my mind tells me that logically, if you could state a finite answer about God, if you could draw a neat box around Him and say to your friend – here then is my God, God would not be all that the bible tells us He is. How can you provide a finite answer about a being that is, by the very nature of the Godhead, infinite? In fact, if we could ‘define God’ would that not also require us to be equal to God, since a definition, a finite description of something, requires that you understand it. If we look back through the bible, it is not hard to find the description of the first being to believe in this line of reasoning…Luke 10:18 tells us “I watched satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning” Satan’s fall was a result of him placing him self on equal footing with God.
We all have questions. Last week in Israel, a wedding reception of some 300 people were all looking far into the future, thinking of the wonderful journey this couple had started…and the floor collapsed, killing several people. Do you think they have questions now? What are we to do?
Later in her letter, my friend tells me that she defines living in God’s way as doing good, and being fair and just in all her dealings, and apologizing when she wrongs someone. Certainly an admirable approach to living in our society. What would happen if she was asked to be fair and just and be killed for it, or to alter her beliefs a little and to live? How easy would it be to rely on your own strength to be good, if your life was at risk? If the apostles were motivated by only a desire to do good and talk about Christ how far would they have made it? How then did the disciples make it through martyrdom after martyrdom, confessing Christ’s majesty even with their dying breath, unless they were buoyed up by divine power? – and that divine power was the Holy Spirit.
I would ask another question – without God as the ruler by which we measure our lives, how good is good enough? At the end of the day, being able to say ‘I have been a good person today and I can sleep with a clear conscience’ is only the first part of it. With the Spirit in our hearts, we are also convicted to realize that our best is still not sufficient to match God’s goodness…and the prayer becomes ‘Lord thank you for helping me to do some good today, I am sorry for my sin and I ask for your guidance to help me sin no more.’ If our goodness is measured by our standard, and not God’s, it is easy to meet that standard and, when things get rough, to adjust that standard.
I have to ask the next question of my friend’s letter – if you are doubtful of the truth of the resurrection, can you believe that the Holy Comforter is alive and with us today? What of the promise made in Romans – that we will be both sons and daughters of the Most High and at the same time be brothers and sisters in Christ? God does not just call us to be good, but charges us to go forth in the world as His witnesses, preaching the gospel to the nations. This is not just an intimate relationship for us to enjoy in the privacy of our own homes – it is intended to be used. Through the conviction of the Spirit we are tasked to accept others as Jesus did – regardless of their state of righteousness or sin – regarding them as the lost, not as losers. The only way we can hope to overcome our prejudices and the rose coloured glasses that each of us sees the world through, is through allowing the Holy Spirit to work within us.
My brothers and sisters in Christ, the truth for us is: we are called to live in the Spirit every moment of every day, and to trust in Him always. Matthew Henry tells us that the apostles ‘…were all filled with the Holy Ghost, more than before. They were more filled with the comforts of the Spirit, rejoiced more than even in the love of Christ and the hope of heaven: in it all their grief’s and fears were swallowed up.’ What a wonderful feeling, to have all of your fears swallowed up! It is there for us to receive, if we are willing to surrender all to the Lord.
There are no complete answers available for us when it comes to God, and that is a good thing. We are told that only those in the Spirit can profess that ‘Jesus is Lord’ and mean it. As Christians there is always a leap of faith involved in our belief, and that leap is made possible by welcoming the Holy Spirit into our hearts, so that we become consecrated to God. On this feast day of Pentecost, let us join together in prayer to consecrate this parish and ourselves in service to the Lord, through the indwelling presence of His Holy Spirit in each of us.
Let us pray.
O Holy Spirit, Creator, be gracious to the Catholic Church and to this Parish of St John the Evangelist; and by thy heavenly power make it strong and secure against the attacks of its enemies; and renew in love and grace the spirit of thy servants, whom thou hast anointed, that they may glorify thee and the Father and his only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
Holy Spirit, Spirit of truth, come into our hearts that we may go forth bearing the fire of thy love. Descend upon this congregation and fill us to overflowing. Help us to surrender our focus on ourselves that we may do the will of the Father in all we do. Amen and Amen.
