Yea, it’s Pentecost and all, but I feel about 3 flavors of unwin this morning. Here’s hoping it’s like yesterday where by afternoontimes it goes away.
John 7:37-39; 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13; Psalm 104:24-35; Acts 2:1-11
It’s really hard to preach on the Holy Spirit. It’s mostly because the Spirit is rather shy – He always points us towards Jesus. The Spirit has historically not wanted to be noticed. So what do we do? It’s not that we should ignore this member of the Trinity, and in fact I’m kind of stuck because last week I said I was going to talk all about the Spirit this week, but it’s just that the Holy Spirit would much rather we interact with Christ.
So what is the Spirit all about? There’s a few things we know: we know that the Spirit empowers people to do things they couldn’t otherwise do, as evidenced in the book of Acts and numerous points in the Old Testament; we know the Spirit was hovering over the waters at creation. And yet knowledge of the Spirit is a defining moment in the history of the church.
So let’s take a look. John’s gospel takes a lot of time talking about the Spirit, and what the Spirit is up to in the world. In John 7, Jesus is teaching during the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles. This feast lasted a few days, and on the last day of the Feast, apparently Jesus stood up and, basically, yelled: “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.” He says something similar quiet a bit later in this gospel, but indeed John gives us a bit of explanation.
John says that by living water, what Jesus meant was that the Holy Spirit would be coming upon his followers, but not yet, because Jesus had yet to be crucified and rise again. Now, 40 days after his resurrection, something very interesting happened. The disciples were all hanging out in Jerusalem, which isn’t too uncommon. But do you remember those times when the wind picks up coming out of the canyon and it makes it all kinds of loud in here? Well, imagine that only louder, and that’s what happened to the disciples as they were gathered together.
Then, just to make it stranger, it looked like their heads were on fire. Then they started talking. In at least sixteen languages. So that everyone that was in the crowd remotely near them heard the good news of Christ’s death and resurrection in their own native languages. This is one of those things that the Spirit can do. Remember last week when Luke referred to the Spirit as “power from on high”? There’s totally a reason.
But the Spirit doesn’t just let us do some amazing things, it also binds us together as one body of Christ. In our lesson from 1 Corinthians, Paul is writing to a church that has a lot of issues, one of which was cliquishness. There were certain groups in the church who treated other groups poorly, and Paul was trying to say that all followers of Christ are equally important, and that just because some people are gifted in different ways doesn’t mean they’re not equal in Christ.
Later in the same chapter, Paul says, “Now the body is not made up of one part but of many. If the foot should say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,’ it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. And if the ear should say, ‘Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,’ it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has arranged the parts of the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be.”
It’s the same idea as how the body of Christ works. Some people are preachers, some are teachers, some a cleaners, some are caretakers. But not a single role in the body of Christ is more important than any other. Sure, some parts of the body are in leadership roles, but as Christ was that leader should be a servant first.
It’s the Spirit who gives us these abilities, allowing us to fill our roles within the Church, and it’s the Spirit who binds us together, as a body, and to Christ, so that we may together go and do the work that God has prepared for us.