Happy Birthday, everybody! Today we celebrate the birthday of the church — not the birthday of this parish, but of all who follow in the ways of Christ Jesus. On this day, some ordinary people began to turn the world upside down.
Before the Holy Spirit came, there was no such thing as the Christian church; the first disciples of Jesus were not increasing in number; they were fearful, stagnant. But after this experience of God’s Spirit of boldness being poured out on them, their numbers went from 120 to 3,000. That’s a factor of 25 times as many! How did they attract such enthusiasm that so many people joined on the spot?
The listeners declare it: “In our own languages we hear people proclaiming God’s deeds of power.” And what are God’s deeds of power? They’re not simply stories about Jesus’ miracles, or even the story of his rising from the dead. “God’s deeds of power” have to include the stories of how God has worked in your life to change you, to challenge you, to comfort you, to love you infinitely.
We started today’s worship by praying about the Good News of Jesus: “Shed abroad this gift throughout the world by the preaching of the Gospel, that it may reach to the ends of the earth.”
For many years, I was part of a ministry at Grace Cathedral. Once a quarter, we would welcome visitors there, and often have a short conversation with them. One woman I met started to tell me about a place where Jesus’ words about how the Gospel would spread to the ends of earth was literally fulfilled.
I was wondering about this line of thought, but I listened as she reminded me that in the 1700’s Roman Catholic Mexico and Orthodox Russia met just north of here in a place called Fort Ross. The languages and customs were very different, but each party could tell that the other party shared the faith of Christ.
Pentecost was an ancient spring harvest festival, when people gathered in the first fruits of the earth after a cold winter had turned into a hopeful spring. The followers of Christ Jesus know a more profound harvest, a spiritual harvest!
Those 120 people knew times of sadness and abandonment and uncertainty, but in God’s Spirit they harvested spiritual gifts that were new and unexpected. They felt the rush of a violent wind, filling the house where they were praying — they saw divided tongues as of fire, resting on each one, like condensed halos.
All of us here have had the experience of some moments of inner fire or bliss, and sometimes those moments come when we are in community. Some describe it as “spine-tingling”. Some deep, deep realization occurs to our minds and hearts, and then it seems like a subtle inner waterfall cascades down, or wells up from below.
Those spiritual “spine-tingling” moments may come about in sacred music, or when we’ve touched the soul of another person in a moment of deep sharing. At such times, we feel somethings almost tangible, as if we are radiant — as if something in us understands the halos painted above the “official” saints.
People who progress in the spiritual life have names for such blissful moments: names like “consolation.” Spiritual guides caution us not to become greedy for them.
Rather than seek only the consolations of God, seek the God who gives consolations. Otherwise we risk becoming addicted to inner bliss, and forgo outer service of neighbor.
The poet William Blake puts it this way:
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the wingéd life destroy.
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.
We find quite a range of ways of showing forth the Holy Spirit’s life in our own lives. Our personal experiences vary so much; and the Holy Spirit blows where it wills. This matter of discernment explains why the sacred authors stress the variety of God’s gifts, sometimes described as the seven-fold gifts of the Holy Spirit:
- Wisdom
- Understanding
- Right Judgment
- Courage
- Knowledge
- Reverence
- Awe of God
Does any one Christian display all these gifts all the time? That’s not possible. In fact, that’s why the body of Christ has so many members with a great range of gifts.
How simultaneously challenging and wonderful it is, that Christ’s body shines forth with such a spectrum of temperaments and perspectives and ideas and gifts!
Even here at St. Alban’s we display a great range of abilities and limitations. We need one another to make a healthy church that shares the gifts of the Spirit. In the words of today’s Collect: “Shed abroad this gift throughout the world, by the preaching of the Gospel, that it may reach to the ends of the earth.”
