Sermon Audio
May 15, 2016 Pentecost Sunday
Pentecost, At Last
Joel 2:21-32, Psalm 145, Acts 2:1-11, St. John 14:15-31
My dad was a sprout during the Great Depression. His family fared better than most. His dad worked as a superintendent in the Texas Company oil field just outside of town and he remained gainfully employed through that dark period.They live d in West Columbia, Texas, home of the fightin’ Roughnecks, which is just up the road from East Columbia.
When Dad was 8 or 9 it became the custom for his mother to give him a nickel each Saturday night – assuming he had been reasonably well behaved and had minded his chores. That nickel would cover both admission to the movies and the price of a candy bar. Dad would meet up with a couple of his pals and they would head over to the Bijou Theater on the main drag and take in the show.
One summer night, one of the boys had a better idea. He said he’d heard about a regular Saturday night event that promised to be a better show. And not only that, they could keep their nickels in their pockets because it was free.
So the three boys headed for the big tent on the edge of town where the Pentecostal church met. They held their service on Saturday night because this was the Texas Gulf Coast and the days were hotter than blazes.
The Pentecostals also rolled up the bottom edges of their tent all the way around so that any breeze that might stir wouldn’t go to waste. That gave three puckish boys an opportunity to flop on their bellies and peer inside.
The Pentecostal preacher was a fellow named One-Arm Brown. He had transitioned from his previous career as a bootlegger after he lost an arm in the course of a high-speed chase. A revenuer got off a lucky shot that sent the bootlegger skidding off the gravel road and into a tree.
This unfortunate incident limited him to the point that he felt compelled to withdraw from the bootleggers’ guild and move on to the related field of preaching. He reckoned that both jobs were about making people feel better during those difficult days.
Well, on this particular night as the boys looked on the band got to playing and the preacher got to preaching and before long some of the folks appeared to enter a state of frenzy. A comely lass of about 17 became so ecstatic that she fell off of her chair and began to roll around in the center aisle.
As she did the hem of her skirt began to ride up higher and higher. The widow Jones, who was seated right there on the aisle, reached down to pull the young lady’s skirt back down. Whereupon Pastor One-Armed Brown held up his one arm and bellowed, “Desist, Sister Jones, desist. And let her glory shine.”
Dad and his buddies were quite faithful in their Saturday-night church attendance for some time thereafter. The only downside for Dad, I suspect, was that the service at the Presbyterian Church in East Columbia, where his mother dragged him every Sunday morning, got even more boring.
And so as we celebrate the Feast of Pentecost I pose the question: Is that how God the Holy Spirit operates in His creation?
Here’s another: Why isn’t Pentecost as big a deal as Christmas? Martin Luther called the Holy Spirit, who appeared in this world finally and fully on Pentecost, alter Christus, another Christ. Did the old Reformer go too far?
He did not. Luther captured very well in that phrase the stature of the Spirit as Scripture presents Him. The Christ and the Spirit are equally Persons of the Godhead. What’s more, they are intimately associated not only in their Personhood but also in their work.
It sometimes appears in Scripture that the Christ needs the direction and even the power of the Spirit to accomplish His work, as when He is led by the Spirit into the wilderness to face the temptation of Satan or when He returns by the power of the Spirit into Galilee.
At the synagogue in Nazareth, He reads from Isaiah 61, where it is prophesied that the Spirit will come upon Him. Elsewhere, we read that the Christ has or gives or sends the Spirit, as though the Christ is the more powerful of the two.
But when we take a step back and view the Bible as a whole, we see without much difficulty the Christ and the Spirit working hand-in-hand for the salvation and edification of the people of God. Their missions are merged into a seamless whole.
I want to call your attention to a picture that illustrates the relationship of Christ and Spirit. It appears in the 14th chapter of the Book of Leviticus. God is giving Moses laws for the cleansing of lepers and He takes him through a rather elaborate two-stage procedure for what to do when the priest determines that a leper has been cleansed – that’s the word that’s used, “cleansed.”
After an initial ritual involving two birds, God commands shaving of hair, washing of clothes and ritual bathing to mark the person’s new state of cleanness. The healed leper, who has been forced to remain outside the camp and apart from God’s tabernacle, returns to the community. And then we read:
"And the priest shall take one male lamb and offer it as a trespass offering, and the log of oil (the “log” is a measure, about a half-pint), and wave them as a wave offering before the LORD. 13 "Then he shall kill the lamb in the place where he kills the sin offering and the burnt offering, in a holy place; for as the sin offering is the priest's, so is the trespass offering. It is most holy. 14 The priest shall take some of the blood of the trespass offering, and the priest shall put it on the tip of the right ear of him who is to be cleansed, on the thumb of his right hand, and on the big toe of his right foot. 15 And the priest shall take some of the log of oil, and pour it into the palm of his own left hand.
16 "Then the priest shall dip his right finger in the oil that is in his left hand, and shall sprinkle some of the oil with his finger seven times before the LORD. 17 And of the rest of the oil in his hand, the priest shall put some on the tip of the right ear of him who is to be cleansed, on the thumb of his right hand, and on the big toe of his right foot, on the blood of the trespass offering.” (Leviticus 14:12-17)
Now, I know that passages such as this one from our own sacred text sound today like the initiation rites of some secret society that meets in a river bottom on foggy nights. The rituals of ancient Judaism are far removed from our experience – until we look into how they prefigure the very real practice of our faith in the here and now.
In this picture, the two agents God commands for cleansing are blood and oil. We find sin presented as spiritual leprosy. The leper has been put outside the camp because no one who is unclean may dwell where God dwells.
The priest is the representative of God. He has no power to cleanse the leper but he does have authority to authenticate healing God has done.
The priest has pronounced the leper cleansed while outside the camp and performed the first-stage ritual with the birds. He has restored the leper to the life of the saints in the holy city where God dwells among them.
The priest then kills a lamb and makes atonement for the leper “before the Lord.” Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sin.
The blood of the lamb is mixed with the water of cleansing that the priest sprinkles. The priest also applies oil. The blood of the Lamb hardly requires explanation. Both Old and New Testaments use oil to picture the Holy Spirit.
First, the priest applies some of the blood of the lamb who is slain to various parts of the leper’s body -- the ear, thumb and big toe. He is following the same procedure used for the consecration of priests.
He whom God does not cleanse remains outside the holy city. He whom God cleanses is restored to the community of the saints of God on the same basis as those consecrated priests of God.
After administering the blood, the priest applies oil to those same body parts, as our text says, “on (meaning “on top of”) the blood of the trespass offering.” That cleansed person now has a place in the same holy city as the priests of God and he has a right to the same blood and oil, the justification and the sanctification of God, which are inseparable.
This is the picture of blended blood and oil, justification and sanctification, Christ and Spirit we bring to our texts for today.
In our reading from Acts 2 we find the apostles of God assembled in Jerusalem for the Feast of Pentecost at harvest time, celebrated each year 50 days after the anniversary of God’s giving of the law to Moses. The Lord Jesus, who came to fulfill that law, had been walking on the earth, healing many, including lepers.
In Luke 5, we see Him cleansing one leper and then telling him to go and show himself to the priests and to offer sacrifices. God had healed him; there remained only the offering of thanks and the authentication of the priests. Immediately following, Jesus heals a paralytic and then tells him his sins are forgiven, inviting the wrath of the Pharisees, who are indignant because they know that only God can forgive sins. They just don’t know God when he stands nose-to-nose with them.
In Acts 2, the Spirit enters with the sound of a mighty rushing wind and with the appearance of divided tongues as of fire. Like oil, wind and fire are common metaphors for the Holy Spirit. This fire rests on each of the apostles, a purifying agent come to cleanse spiritual lepers. And there are assembled there many more of the people of God from near and far. They hear the apostles, filled with the Holy Spirit, speak in strange languages and, stranger still, each hearer understands in his own language what is said.
It is a mysterious thing, this filling of the Spirit. But of this we may be sure: Our Lord does fill us with His Spirit. To put a fine theological point on it, the Holy Spirit is incarnate in us. Like our Lord Jesus, He takes on human flesh. As God the Son took on flesh, so does God the Spirit. In our gospel lesson from John 14 we heard Jesus telling His disciples, “You know him, for He dwells with you, and will be in you.”
Again, we hear the sublime symphony that is the concerted working of the Persons of the Holy Trinity. The Son took on flesh when the Spirit “overshadowed” Mary. The Spirit takes on flesh when the Father and the Son send Him to dwell within each of us who find salvation in Christ, then to experience sanctification by the Spirit.
The Son sent the Spirit to indwell His saints. The Spirit will deliver those saints to the Son on His return in glory.
I find myself aching to beg forgiveness of the Spirit. The Son had no human father and thus the flesh He inhabits has known no sin. The Spirit takes up residence in the likes of me. While my Lord sits at the right hand of His Father and intercedes for me, the Spirit inhabits the dark, damp places within me and intervenes against me. He remains locked in mortal combat with my flesh, waging war for my sanctification.
Is that any way to treat God? And yet He delights in this grim toil for He would till forever this sordid soil to present to the Father the spotless spoil of one soul won back from sin.
The Christ suffered His flesh to be torn on the cross that He might spill forth blood mixed with water to sprinkle us and cleanse us of sin. The Spirit indwells our sin-torn flesh that He might anoint our wounds with his healing oil and preserve us unto righteousness.
Maltbie D. Babcock wrote No Distant Lord:
No distant Lord have I,
Loving afar to be,
Made flesh for me He cannot rest
Until He rests in me . . .
Ascended now to God
My witness there to be,
His witness here am I because
His Spirit dwells in me.
Our Lord earned the right to send the Spirit into the hearts of sinners. He earned it on the cross. When He offered to His Father satisfaction for your sins and mine He purchased the privilege of bestowing His Spirit on us, as John the Baptist had foretold: “He shall baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”
Christ became a curse for us. Just as God cleansed the leper outside the camp in Leviticus, Christ canceled the curse of spiritual leprosy on His cross. And just as the priest applied oil upon blood to the one who was healed, the oil of the Spirit follows the blood of Christ to make the redeemed of the Lord fit for God’s service. We may return to the presence of God anointed for the service of God.
Pentecost follows hard upon Ascension. Because the Son took the form of one man so He could offer himself upon that cross, because God’s perfect plan called for His Son to return to His side and intercede for us, Another descended into this sin-stained creation to complete the work our Lord had begun.
The disciples, having at long last grasped that this Jesus of Nazareth is indeed God, do not yet comprehend the meaning of their redemption in Him until the Spirit comes upon them with power at Pentecost. At the Tower of Babel, God had made one language many to scatter men bent on building a godless kingdom over the face of the earth.
At Pentecost, He makes many languages one so that all of God’s people may realize their common purpose of building God’s kingdom upon the earth. Only now do the apostles, filled with the Spirit, begin to proclaim the power of the risen Christ to save sinners.
Spread out before them are the good works God has prepared beforehand for them to walk in. They must learn and serve, teach and preach, submit and overcome. They must build Christ’s church.
And so also for us. Like it or not, this is who He has made us, witnesses of the risen Christ and temples of the Holy Spirit. We are purer in God’s sight than we are in our own mirrors because we have been washed clean in the blood of the Lamb.
As God and man are united in Christ, the Spirit inhabits human flesh and applies the salvation our Lord has won for us so that we might bear witness of Him among our fellow sinners.
It is then incumbent upon us to make our Lord’s interests our own. Here is where our human will comes into play. We can choose to serve the flesh or the Spirit, the self or God. “Be not drunk with wine but be filled with the Holy Spirit.”
Be not drunk with pride, lust, power, riches, rich food . . . but be filled by the Holy Spirit. Do not grieve the Holy Spirit by desecrating His temple which is your body. If you would live for Christ, live by His Holy Spirit. If you love God you will love the God who dwells in you.
There remains one thing to be said before we celebrate our union with our Lord. Francis Schaeffer spoke of what he called the “final apologetic,” or defense of our faith. After we have cited God’s work in creation, after we have extolled His work of redemption, we have one last argument to make to a skeptical, sin-stained world.
It is our love for one another. We can rejoice in our love for one another because the Holy Spirit appeared in the world at Pentecost and lives this day in each of us. Amen.
Pentecost, At Last
Joel 2:21-32, Psalm 145, Acts 2:1-11, St. John 14:15-31
My dad was a sprout during the Great Depression. His family fared better than most. His dad worked as a superintendent in the Texas Company oil field just outside of town and he remained gainfully employed through that dark period.They live d in West Columbia, Texas, home of the fightin’ Roughnecks, which is just up the road from East Columbia.
When Dad was 8 or 9 it became the custom for his mother to give him a nickel each Saturday night – assuming he had been reasonably well behaved and had minded his chores. That nickel would cover both admission to the movies and the price of a candy bar. Dad would meet up with a couple of his pals and they would head over to the Bijou Theater on the main drag and take in the show.
One summer night, one of the boys had a better idea. He said he’d heard about a regular Saturday night event that promised to be a better show. And not only that, they could keep their nickels in their pockets because it was free.
So the three boys headed for the big tent on the edge of town where the Pentecostal church met. They held their service on Saturday night because this was the Texas Gulf Coast and the days were hotter than blazes.
The Pentecostals also rolled up the bottom edges of their tent all the way around so that any breeze that might stir wouldn’t go to waste. That gave three puckish boys an opportunity to flop on their bellies and peer inside.
The Pentecostal preacher was a fellow named One-Arm Brown. He had transitioned from his previous career as a bootlegger after he lost an arm in the course of a high-speed chase. A revenuer got off a lucky shot that sent the bootlegger skidding off the gravel road and into a tree.
This unfortunate incident limited him to the point that he felt compelled to withdraw from the bootleggers’ guild and move on to the related field of preaching. He reckoned that both jobs were about making people feel better during those difficult days.
Well, on this particular night as the boys looked on the band got to playing and the preacher got to preaching and before long some of the folks appeared to enter a state of frenzy. A comely lass of about 17 became so ecstatic that she fell off of her chair and began to roll around in the center aisle.
As she did the hem of her skirt began to ride up higher and higher. The widow Jones, who was seated right there on the aisle, reached down to pull the young lady’s skirt back down. Whereupon Pastor One-Armed Brown held up his one arm and bellowed, “Desist, Sister Jones, desist. And let her glory shine.”
Dad and his buddies were quite faithful in their Saturday-night church attendance for some time thereafter. The only downside for Dad, I suspect, was that the service at the Presbyterian Church in East Columbia, where his mother dragged him every Sunday morning, got even more boring.
And so as we celebrate the Feast of Pentecost I pose the question: Is that how God the Holy Spirit operates in His creation?
Here’s another: Why isn’t Pentecost as big a deal as Christmas? Martin Luther called the Holy Spirit, who appeared in this world finally and fully on Pentecost, alter Christus, another Christ. Did the old Reformer go too far?
He did not. Luther captured very well in that phrase the stature of the Spirit as Scripture presents Him. The Christ and the Spirit are equally Persons of the Godhead. What’s more, they are intimately associated not only in their Personhood but also in their work.
It sometimes appears in Scripture that the Christ needs the direction and even the power of the Spirit to accomplish His work, as when He is led by the Spirit into the wilderness to face the temptation of Satan or when He returns by the power of the Spirit into Galilee.
At the synagogue in Nazareth, He reads from Isaiah 61, where it is prophesied that the Spirit will come upon Him. Elsewhere, we read that the Christ has or gives or sends the Spirit, as though the Christ is the more powerful of the two.
But when we take a step back and view the Bible as a whole, we see without much difficulty the Christ and the Spirit working hand-in-hand for the salvation and edification of the people of God. Their missions are merged into a seamless whole.
I want to call your attention to a picture that illustrates the relationship of Christ and Spirit. It appears in the 14th chapter of the Book of Leviticus. God is giving Moses laws for the cleansing of lepers and He takes him through a rather elaborate two-stage procedure for what to do when the priest determines that a leper has been cleansed – that’s the word that’s used, “cleansed.”
After an initial ritual involving two birds, God commands shaving of hair, washing of clothes and ritual bathing to mark the person’s new state of cleanness. The healed leper, who has been forced to remain outside the camp and apart from God’s tabernacle, returns to the community. And then we read:
"And the priest shall take one male lamb and offer it as a trespass offering, and the log of oil (the “log” is a measure, about a half-pint), and wave them as a wave offering before the LORD. 13 "Then he shall kill the lamb in the place where he kills the sin offering and the burnt offering, in a holy place; for as the sin offering is the priest's, so is the trespass offering. It is most holy. 14 The priest shall take some of the blood of the trespass offering, and the priest shall put it on the tip of the right ear of him who is to be cleansed, on the thumb of his right hand, and on the big toe of his right foot. 15 And the priest shall take some of the log of oil, and pour it into the palm of his own left hand.
16 "Then the priest shall dip his right finger in the oil that is in his left hand, and shall sprinkle some of the oil with his finger seven times before the LORD. 17 And of the rest of the oil in his hand, the priest shall put some on the tip of the right ear of him who is to be cleansed, on the thumb of his right hand, and on the big toe of his right foot, on the blood of the trespass offering.” (Leviticus 14:12-17)
Now, I know that passages such as this one from our own sacred text sound today like the initiation rites of some secret society that meets in a river bottom on foggy nights. The rituals of ancient Judaism are far removed from our experience – until we look into how they prefigure the very real practice of our faith in the here and now.
In this picture, the two agents God commands for cleansing are blood and oil. We find sin presented as spiritual leprosy. The leper has been put outside the camp because no one who is unclean may dwell where God dwells.
The priest is the representative of God. He has no power to cleanse the leper but he does have authority to authenticate healing God has done.
The priest has pronounced the leper cleansed while outside the camp and performed the first-stage ritual with the birds. He has restored the leper to the life of the saints in the holy city where God dwells among them.
The priest then kills a lamb and makes atonement for the leper “before the Lord.” Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sin.
The blood of the lamb is mixed with the water of cleansing that the priest sprinkles. The priest also applies oil. The blood of the Lamb hardly requires explanation. Both Old and New Testaments use oil to picture the Holy Spirit.
First, the priest applies some of the blood of the lamb who is slain to various parts of the leper’s body -- the ear, thumb and big toe. He is following the same procedure used for the consecration of priests.
He whom God does not cleanse remains outside the holy city. He whom God cleanses is restored to the community of the saints of God on the same basis as those consecrated priests of God.
After administering the blood, the priest applies oil to those same body parts, as our text says, “on (meaning “on top of”) the blood of the trespass offering.” That cleansed person now has a place in the same holy city as the priests of God and he has a right to the same blood and oil, the justification and the sanctification of God, which are inseparable.
This is the picture of blended blood and oil, justification and sanctification, Christ and Spirit we bring to our texts for today.
In our reading from Acts 2 we find the apostles of God assembled in Jerusalem for the Feast of Pentecost at harvest time, celebrated each year 50 days after the anniversary of God’s giving of the law to Moses. The Lord Jesus, who came to fulfill that law, had been walking on the earth, healing many, including lepers.
In Luke 5, we see Him cleansing one leper and then telling him to go and show himself to the priests and to offer sacrifices. God had healed him; there remained only the offering of thanks and the authentication of the priests. Immediately following, Jesus heals a paralytic and then tells him his sins are forgiven, inviting the wrath of the Pharisees, who are indignant because they know that only God can forgive sins. They just don’t know God when he stands nose-to-nose with them.
In Acts 2, the Spirit enters with the sound of a mighty rushing wind and with the appearance of divided tongues as of fire. Like oil, wind and fire are common metaphors for the Holy Spirit. This fire rests on each of the apostles, a purifying agent come to cleanse spiritual lepers. And there are assembled there many more of the people of God from near and far. They hear the apostles, filled with the Holy Spirit, speak in strange languages and, stranger still, each hearer understands in his own language what is said.
It is a mysterious thing, this filling of the Spirit. But of this we may be sure: Our Lord does fill us with His Spirit. To put a fine theological point on it, the Holy Spirit is incarnate in us. Like our Lord Jesus, He takes on human flesh. As God the Son took on flesh, so does God the Spirit. In our gospel lesson from John 14 we heard Jesus telling His disciples, “You know him, for He dwells with you, and will be in you.”
Again, we hear the sublime symphony that is the concerted working of the Persons of the Holy Trinity. The Son took on flesh when the Spirit “overshadowed” Mary. The Spirit takes on flesh when the Father and the Son send Him to dwell within each of us who find salvation in Christ, then to experience sanctification by the Spirit.
The Son sent the Spirit to indwell His saints. The Spirit will deliver those saints to the Son on His return in glory.
I find myself aching to beg forgiveness of the Spirit. The Son had no human father and thus the flesh He inhabits has known no sin. The Spirit takes up residence in the likes of me. While my Lord sits at the right hand of His Father and intercedes for me, the Spirit inhabits the dark, damp places within me and intervenes against me. He remains locked in mortal combat with my flesh, waging war for my sanctification.
Is that any way to treat God? And yet He delights in this grim toil for He would till forever this sordid soil to present to the Father the spotless spoil of one soul won back from sin.
The Christ suffered His flesh to be torn on the cross that He might spill forth blood mixed with water to sprinkle us and cleanse us of sin. The Spirit indwells our sin-torn flesh that He might anoint our wounds with his healing oil and preserve us unto righteousness.
Maltbie D. Babcock wrote No Distant Lord:
No distant Lord have I,
Loving afar to be,
Made flesh for me He cannot rest
Until He rests in me . . .
Ascended now to God
My witness there to be,
His witness here am I because
His Spirit dwells in me.
Our Lord earned the right to send the Spirit into the hearts of sinners. He earned it on the cross. When He offered to His Father satisfaction for your sins and mine He purchased the privilege of bestowing His Spirit on us, as John the Baptist had foretold: “He shall baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”
Christ became a curse for us. Just as God cleansed the leper outside the camp in Leviticus, Christ canceled the curse of spiritual leprosy on His cross. And just as the priest applied oil upon blood to the one who was healed, the oil of the Spirit follows the blood of Christ to make the redeemed of the Lord fit for God’s service. We may return to the presence of God anointed for the service of God.
Pentecost follows hard upon Ascension. Because the Son took the form of one man so He could offer himself upon that cross, because God’s perfect plan called for His Son to return to His side and intercede for us, Another descended into this sin-stained creation to complete the work our Lord had begun.
The disciples, having at long last grasped that this Jesus of Nazareth is indeed God, do not yet comprehend the meaning of their redemption in Him until the Spirit comes upon them with power at Pentecost. At the Tower of Babel, God had made one language many to scatter men bent on building a godless kingdom over the face of the earth.
At Pentecost, He makes many languages one so that all of God’s people may realize their common purpose of building God’s kingdom upon the earth. Only now do the apostles, filled with the Spirit, begin to proclaim the power of the risen Christ to save sinners.
Spread out before them are the good works God has prepared beforehand for them to walk in. They must learn and serve, teach and preach, submit and overcome. They must build Christ’s church.
And so also for us. Like it or not, this is who He has made us, witnesses of the risen Christ and temples of the Holy Spirit. We are purer in God’s sight than we are in our own mirrors because we have been washed clean in the blood of the Lamb.
As God and man are united in Christ, the Spirit inhabits human flesh and applies the salvation our Lord has won for us so that we might bear witness of Him among our fellow sinners.
It is then incumbent upon us to make our Lord’s interests our own. Here is where our human will comes into play. We can choose to serve the flesh or the Spirit, the self or God. “Be not drunk with wine but be filled with the Holy Spirit.”
Be not drunk with pride, lust, power, riches, rich food . . . but be filled by the Holy Spirit. Do not grieve the Holy Spirit by desecrating His temple which is your body. If you would live for Christ, live by His Holy Spirit. If you love God you will love the God who dwells in you.
There remains one thing to be said before we celebrate our union with our Lord. Francis Schaeffer spoke of what he called the “final apologetic,” or defense of our faith. After we have cited God’s work in creation, after we have extolled His work of redemption, we have one last argument to make to a skeptical, sin-stained world.
It is our love for one another. We can rejoice in our love for one another because the Holy Spirit appeared in the world at Pentecost and lives this day in each of us. Amen.