It was 1966. I was an acolyte – an “altar boy” – at my family’s Episcopal Church in Southern California. It was Holy Week. There were lots of services, and we’d just finished the biggest one of them all, Easter Sunday morning worship with all the smells and bells. It was a grand production, even for a small church like ours. We were back in the Sacristy – the room where we robed and kept all the things that worship in a church like that like requires – and as our priest struggled to get himself out of his vestments, I heard him mutter under his breath – “Thank God that’s over!”
Having run the gauntlet of Holy Week services myself as a local church minister for some 50 years (4 of them right here with you), I understand what he meant. He was tired. He just wanted to go home. Eat some chocolate. Have a martini. Get a good night’s sleep. The Church Year is a marathon that ministers run from Advent at the end of November to Easter Sunday in the Spring, and if they are doing their jobs right, then they will stagger across the finish line come Easter Sunday, and collapse exhausted. They’re done, I get it, I really do. But here’s the problem – Biblically, Easter isn’t the finish line. The Gospel story wasn’t over when Jesus got up on the third day. There was still more to come! He still had things to do!
2 weeks from today it will be Pentecost Sunday, and in the Gospel scheme of things, Pentecost is what Jesus did next. Spiritually, Pentecost is a high holy day on par with Christmas and Easter. In fact, it’s Pentecost that makes Christmas and Easter more than just a recital of ancient history. As an Eastern Orthodox Bishop told a meeting of the World Council of Churches back in 1968 – “Without the Holy Spirit: God is far away, Christ stays in the past, the Gospel is a dead letter, and the Church is just (another human) organization… But with the Holy Spirit: God is with us, in us, the Risen Christ is present, the Gospel is the power of life, and the Church is a fellowship with the Living God.”
At the beginning of the Gospel of John we’re told that Jesus Christ came to do two things. He came as the Lamb of God to “take away the sins of the world” (John 1:29). That’s what we remember and celebrate in the worship of Holy Week. But we’re also told at the beginning of John that Jesus Christ came “to baptize us with the Holy Spirit” (John 1:33), and this is what the church will remember and celebrate on Pentecost Sunday.
It’s “inconceivable,” E. Stanley Jones once said, that God would “lay before us the amazing charter of a new life” in Jesus Christ, and then fail to give us the one thing that makes it all possible, namely the indwelling and empowering presence of the Holy Spirit. But this is exactly what happens when we act as if Easter is the end of the story. When we dawdle beside the empty tomb and don’t follow the Risen Christ to where He goes next, or pay attention to what He does next, then our Christianity is going to be unnecessarily and unfortunately truncated.
H. Wheeler Robinson (1872 – 1945), an English Baptist preacher who taught Old Testament at Oxford University throughout the first half of the 20th century. In 1913, during a very serious illness, Dr. Robinson’s faith failed him. The truths of Christianity that he had preached to others failed to provide him with the peace, strength, and hope he so desperately needed in his hour of greatest need. Lying in his sickbed, Dr. Robinson said that his faith was like a great big balloon that was hovering above him just beyond his reach, and while a cord trailed down from that balloon, he didn’t have the strength to grab hold of it.
Well, Dr. Robinson eventually got better, and when he was finally back on his feet, he devoted himself to figuring out what had gone wrong. Why had his faith failed him when he desperately needed what faith promises, and his 1928 book – “The Christian Experience of the Holy Spirit” – was his answer. From careful research and prayerful soul searching, Dr. Robinson concluded that while he’d held to the form of religion, he’d had no real experience of its power, and the reason why was because he’d neglected what the New Testament says about the person and work of the Holy Spirit.
This is what the Holy Spirit does. The Holy Spirit takes what God in Jesus Christ did for us 2000 years ago and applies it to our hearts now. But when we get to Easter and think that’s all there is, we wind up in the same troubling place where Dr. Robinson found himself, with a faith that while true enough, isn’t real in our lived experience. It’s theoretical. Oh, we “believe” in the Holy Spirit, but we don’t “know” the Holy Spirit. It’s been my experience that we feel this absence of the Holy Spirit in our lives, and in the life of the church, in three ways. First, we feel it in our poor sense of assurance. Second, we feel it in the slow pace of our personal transformation. And third, we feel it in our lack of urgency to get on with the work that the Risen Christ has left for us to do.
Assurance is that inner sense that we truly belong to God. The New Testament tells us that when we first believe, the Holy Spirit indwells us and begins to bear an inner witness that we really do belong to Him (Galatians 4:6; Romans 8:15-17). This is not “head knowledge,” a matter of having some information, but “heart knowledge,” a matter of knowing that something is true in the depths of our being.
Thomas Goodwin, an English Puritan theologian and preacher from the 17th century, described it as a father and his son walking down a country road together. As they walk, that boy knows that his father loves him. This is not in doubt. But then, out of nowhere, that father drops to his knees, gathers his boy up into his arms, smothers him with kisses, and tells him that he loves him. Then, that father stands up and continues to walk down the road beside his son. Now, that boy knew that his father loved him before this display of affection, but now he feels it in his bones. That’s what assurance is, and that’s what the Holy Spirit does. The Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and when we don’t have it, it usually means that we’re neglecting the Holy Spirit. The slow pace of our moral and spiritual transformation is another sign of a neglect of the Holy Spirit.
God loves us just the way we are, but God loves us way too much to leave us like that. Once we’ve become Christians, there begins a lifelong process of being a Christian. The decision of faith we ask people to make as a church involves a double commitment to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. When we say that “Jesus Christ is our Savior,” what we’re saying is that we have given Him our sins. We’re looking to Christ for forgiveness and for some peace of heart and mind. And when we say that “Jesus Christ is our Lord,” what we’re saying is that we are giving Him our lives. We’re inviting Him in to begin that lifelong work of transforming us into His image and changing us bit by bit and step by step into His likeness. The failure to grow, or for this process of moral and spiritual transformation to slow or even stall, is a result of our neglect of the Holy Spirit, and so is the reluctance of a church to get on with her mission.
One of the first things that Pope Francis said right after he became the leader of the Catholic Church back in 2013 was that when the Holy Spirit shows up the church is going to be pushed outward and onward, and that the church wasn’t going to like it one little bit! “The Holy Spirit annoys us,” the Pope said, and that’s because the Holy Spirit is just so “pushy.” We tend to associate the Holy Spirit with warm fuzzy feelings, but the Holy Spirit agitates us too.
In our Scripture reading this morning from the first chapter of the book of Acts, the Risen Christ told His disciples right before the day of Pentecost that they would receive “power” when the Holy Spirit came upon them, and that they would then become His witnesses, beginning in Jerusalem, expanding outwards to Judea, to Samaria, and then to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8). These ever-widening circles of influence and impact are the work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit pushes the church past its current walls to those who are standing just outside them so that they too might be included. The Holy Spirit makes mission happen, and when it isn’t happening, well, you can be pretty sure that it’s because the Holy Spirit is being resisted, grieved, or even quenched by the church.
It’s the awareness of “something missing” felt in our lack of assurance, in the slow pace of our moral and spiritual transformation, and in the inertia of the church in her mission, that prepares us for the “something more” that the experience of the fullness of the Holy Spirit brings into our lives. It’s when we hunger and thirst for the reality of the things that we say we believe are true that we start to ask, and knock, and seek, and that’s when Jesus said that the fullness of the Holy Spirit will be given to us (Luke 11:13). In our Scripture reading this morning, right before taking His leave of the disciples, the Risen Christ sent them to their knees. “They returned to Jerusalem,” Luke tells us, “went to the upper room, …and with one accord they devoted themselves to prayer” (Acts 1:12-14).
Just as the Church uses the four weeks before Christmas to get Christians ready for their annual remembrance of Christ’s birth, and the 40 days before Easter to get Christians ready for their annual remembrance of Christ’s resurrection, so the church has traditionally used the nine days before Pentecost to get Christians ready for their annual remembrance of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. There are some things God does for us whether we ask Him or not. I’ve never asked God for gravity. I’ve never gotten up in the morning worried about whether or not gravity was going to be in effect that day! Gravity is one of those “creation gifts” that God gives whether we’re aware of it or not. But the gift of the fullness of the Holy Spirit is different. It’s one of the “salvation gifts” that the Bible says we’ve got to ask for specifically, and even repeatedly. This is why Jesus sent His disciples back to the Upper Room to ask for the gift of the Holy Spirit’s fullness for the nine days before Pentecost, and why they with one accord they devoted themselves to prayer.
Jeffrey Simmons was an Episcopal Priest who got irritated when some of his church members kept pestering him to go on this retreat where he could “get the Holy Spirit.” He finally agreed to go, not to get the Holy Spirit mind you, but to get those church members off his back. Long before he got to the retreat center, Jeffrey had already decided that he wasn’t going to get cornered, he wasn’t going to let anybody there pray for him. So, Jeffrey found a quiet out-of-the-way garden at the retreat center where he could hide, and that’s where he spent his retreat – hiding! Still, the Holy Spirit found him.
“Sitting with my back against the trunk of a tree,” Jeffrey wrote later, “I tried to sort out my feelings. I felt trapped, pressured, manipulated… but as the sunlight sparkling through the cool green leaves started to calm me, I became aware of the fact that I (also) felt a little curious, and maybe even a little bit ashamed of myself for not being more (spiritually) adventurous. The whole message of the retreat was – ‘God wants to have a closer and more productive relationship with you, and you can have it if you will just open yourself to receive it.’ I couldn’t argue with that… so I sat under that tree, and I prayed the hardest I had ever prayed in my life, ‘Dear God,’ I prayed, ‘if you have something more for me that I don’t have right now, I’ll take it.’”
Jesus Christ never intended for us to live the Christian life or to do the work of the Church all by ourselves. “You will receive power,” the Risen Christ told His disciples, “when the Holy Spirit comes upon you,” and the coming of that promised Holy Spirit is what the day of Pentecost is all about. But we’ll miss the it if we approach Pentecost as just another one of those days when the church asks us to remember something that happened a long time ago. You see, more than just an historical event, Pentecost is an experience that’s supposed to be repeated in the heart of every believer and in the life of every church – but we’ve got to want it.
Jesus said that our Heavenly Father gives the Holy Spirit to those who ask, and then He sent His disciples back to the Upper Room to pray for the Holy Spirit to come and “clothe them with power from on high.” In fact, the Rosen Christ told His disciples not to budge until they had been filled with the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit in their hearts. Easter is not the end of the story, there’s something more, and if you sense that “something more” as “something missing” in your life, then it’s time to pray – “Dear God, ‘if you have something more for me that I don’t have right now, I’ll take it.’” Amen.
*SOUNDINGS 