The Day of Pentecost
11th May 2008
: 9:00am & 11:45am
Preacher: The
Today we celebrate the birth of
the church, the promised gift of the Spirit comes to change and transform the
disciples and what a difference that made.
Prior to the coming of
the Holy Spirit the Apostles were virtually living in hiding in
the upper room . A great task had been entrusted to them, yet they
had neither the strength nor the will
to begin it.
But after the coming of
the Holy Spirit , they were changed people. They left their
hiding place and set out courageously
to preach the Gospel.
What was it that the
Spirit did to them ?
In promising the Spirit
Jesus said to them, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on
you, and then you will be my witnesses not only in
The Holy Spirit is
powerful beyond
words, and quite untameable. Which , if you reflect upon it, makes sense.
We are talking about GOD
here.
We are talking about the one
who was at work “before the hills in order stood, or
earth received her frame .”
No wonder St Luke, who wrote the
Acts of the Apostles which provided
our first reading, uses words like “astonished”, “amazed”
“bewildered”.
The people in
Noise, wind , fire,
___Luke attempts to say “This is what it was like,” yet in another way it wasn’t like that at all, it was far more than that.
It was as if , just for a moment, you could see the mainsprings of creation. Think of those cautious, frightened and
muddled people in the upper room,
clattering down the steps into the
sunlit street of
Think of their colossal impact their words had : the Spirit wasn’t just in the
mouths of the speakers, the spirit
was in the ears of the
hearers .
Think of the courage with
which Peter, Andrew, James and John confronted the authorities when they were
arrested.
Think of the three
thousand people who declared themselves for Christ that first day. There was an elemental
force at work.
Most of us would
like a tranquil and orderly life. People rank peace and quiet high among their priorities
We prefer our
domestic and professional life to be placid, and our
religion too. How disturbing it is if the Bishop closes a church or
a daughter church, or merges a couple of parishes and changes the times of worship.
How disconcerting when our Sunday morning liturgy with its familure
faces , is suddenly changed or
swollen by an influx of
visitors or immigrants.
Well today we are invited
to contemplate
the glorious
unpredictability of God’s massive,
large scale, powerful, effortless, sovereign, decisive unpredictability.
God is the master of the impossible,
We sometimes talk as if the
church were locked into decline.
Well the Lord of The Church is
capable, with one hand tied behind his back, so to speak, of swamping us with
vocations and conversions. Capable, too of filling us with
peace and forgiveness, as we saw in the Gospel.
Take our churches Melanesian Brotherhood in the Solomon Islands as an example where young men give five years of their life to the church , with no pay and
after two years of study and prayer are commissioned for missionary
service to plant and nurture new parishes through out the
world.
The Melanesian Brothers
are the Front Runners for the gospel through out the
All these things are in the repertoire of the Holy Spirit. We say in the Creed , “We believe. In the Holy Spirit.
The Lord, the giver of life. Do we ?
Is this really true ?
Because if only we will
place unlimited faith and trust in the Spirit, there is no limit to what may happen.
Success in the sense of growth in the
number of committed Christians is
not in our hands. It is the work of God the Holy Spirit to call men and women
to faith in Jesus.
And the Spirit does so in
ways that are often mysterious and beyond any possibility of manipulation or even of comprehension by us.
What is required of us is
faithfulness in word and deed, at whatever cost;
faithfulness in
action for truth
for justice
for mercy
for compassion
Faithfulness in speaking the name of Jesus
when the time is right
Bearing witness, by
explicit word as occasion arises
To God whose we are and
whom we serve.
There are situations
where the word is easy and the deed is costly
There are situations where the
deed is easy and the word is costly
Whether in word or deed , what is required in every situation is that we be
faithful to him who said to his
disciples As the Father sent me , so I send you
And showed them his hands and his side
.