Pentecost Sunday 2025

Transcript is automatically produced. Errors may be present.

And it’s me again, so I’m back again. So welcome. My name’s still Alex. I’m still one of the pastors here. Nothing’s changed in the last 30 seconds or so. Last week I was up in Michigan preaching the church there, Trinity Presbyterian. They sent their special greetings to you and a thank you for allowing me.

That time to, to share with their community. I said to them, look, I just preached 11 weeks in a row there. I think they were happy to let me go. Just we needed someone else to step up here and because I was gone. We get to hear Aaron talk about his underwear and a load of other really important things.

So the team just as always, just stepped in and do a wonderful job. We’re about to read a passage of scripture. In Acts chapter two, it’s this moment in the scriptures where Jesus has died, has been risen, and is about to depart. He’s told his disciples, his earliest followers, the 12 of them that are close to him, the rest of them in no uncertain terms I’m not sticking around.

Here I am going back to my father. Now this leaves the church with this crisis point. Because the question is when any organizational leader, any founder of anything, leaves well, who takes their place? Does Apple survive without Steve Jobs? Turns out they’re doing okay. Does Blackberry survive without its founder?

No. It’s nowhere does Blockbuster survive without, customers, not just as founder, do organizations just continue what happens next? And what’s worst about the situation with this movement is that the people that are maybe first in line to, to own this thing, to run with it, don’t seem suited to running it a tool.

They’re just ordinary guys and what we’ve seen from them so far in the biographies of Jesus life that, that kind of run up to this. Just as a little reminder, the book acts that we’re about to read it, it’s a sequel to Luke, a biography of Jesus life. So those guys they just don’t seem fit for purpose.

They constantly fail in the mission. Jesus has given them constantly are unable to live life like him. Jesus is constantly bailing them out of all the mistakes they make, especially Peter the most outspoken of them. He’s always in some kind of trouble for just either shooting his mouth off or not speaking up when he should.

So there seems like there’s this dearth of leadership, this missing piece. And as well as not necessarily showing up as leaders, they also seem to dislike community. They’re always fighting with who gets to be in charge. They’re always trying to push each other out, push each other After the size. They’re deeply worried about their position and how other people see them.

They seem to be interested in who’s winning and who’s losing they are. I would suggest, just like you and me. They’re like all of us in our worst moments, our moments where we just don’t live up to being the people perhaps we hope that we would be. I notice about myself in some of my bro most broken moments that I’m actually just not as nice a person.

As I think I am, I’m deeply interested in me and where I sit in the order of things. I saw this wonderful Instagram reel the other day where a lady was talking about walking and she said this. What I’ve realized is one of the things I hate is when somebody walks slower than me. If I’m walking somewhere and someone just trails behind, that really irritates me.

And I also hate when someone who walks exactly next to me if they’re like, really like there, like right by me. I don’t like that either. And then I also don’t like when they storm off ahead and leave me in the dust. So my relation after all of those things is that the problem is me, like I am the one that doesn’t like what other people do, doesn’t like community.

And so as the church becomes this organization for good, this organization that as we’ll see is incredible at sharing their possessions, sharing what they have with each other. Oh, we have to recognize that outside of this movement on Pentecost Sunday a couple of thousand years ago, we just don’t become those kinds of people.

If we’re honest at our worst moments, we’re usually in it for ourselves. I once heard a proverb that’s an English proverb that says An English an Englishman’s home. Is his castle we like to keep what we have. You know the phrase Mica, the only way you can say that in English is to use another language.

There’s no English term for that. We just, we like to keep stuff and this is where these guys are. In those moments, I would suggest. So here we go. Acts chapter two, verse one. When the day of Pentecost came, I’ll explain Pentecost in a moment ’cause I realize that might be a foreign term to many of you.

They were all together, or Jesus followers were together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. These people are gathered in a building as Jesus told them to do.

He didn’t specifically say building, but he said, wait in Jerusalem, I’m gonna send you the power you need to live out the mission that I’m leaving you to live out. It seems at this moment that they’re actually all afraid. The potential is that the soldiers that executed Jesus will be looking for, his followers will be cleaning up, and so they hide away in a building.

But in the midst of that hiding, in the midst of that waiting, we’re about to see this moment where God meets with them in language that is probably foreign to many of us. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest. And each of them, all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the spirit enabled them.

This is a moment that for lots of people over a couple of thousand years has been described as the birth of the church. This thing that we do every week. It begins in this moment where as we’ll see, people are dramatically changed. But I’m gonna try and play the role of translator there because depending on where you are in a journey with Jesus, you might say, I’m not sure about that at all.

I’m not, maybe not even started. Or You might have been doing it for 40 years. What we mean by the Holy Spirit will that changes? We’ll get there first. The promise of Jesus is fulfilled that he would send a helper a, a comforter. The spirit is given. Which leads to this question to try and make sure that we’re all on the same page.

What does this writer mean by the Holy Spirit? So if you’ve been in church for a while, you’ve probably got a really easy answer that you know, you can just give in these moments. First of the Holy Spirit, part of the Triun God head or something like that. But if we’re honest, it’s harder. For many of us to figure out interacting with something that has the term spirit attached to it.

If I have to ask you to pi picture God as father, you probably picture someone with a long white beard, someone who looks maybe severe depending on your viewpoint or happy. When I ask you to picture Jesus, you probably picture someone of Middle Eastern origin unless you watched a lot of old movies about Jesus, in which case he has blonde hair and blue eyes, and.

All of those sorts of things. But if I ask you to describe the Holy Spirit, you might say, I’m not sure how I do that. I don’t necessarily have a visual. So while it might seem that this definition is needed for somebody who’s new to following Jesus, in actual fact, we all probably need to go back and have some of that conversation.

So let’s begin with just the term spirit. We use that probably more often than you’d think. You go and perhaps you sit in a meeting and you say, oh man, there was just a weird spirit in there this week. You don’t necessarily mean anything, anyone did anything strange, but you just felt some kind of moment, some kind of behind the scenes conversation that just maybe it caught you off guard.

You, you have a conversation with someone and you say something like, oh, they were just off. Like the spirit with which they entered into that conversation was weird. Maybe you’ve gone to visit places that have a specific feel to them. People talk about going to visit places like Auschwitz and saying, there’s just something here that’s unusual.

It feels weird. There’s a weird spirit to it. So we actually use the language of spirit more than we might first believe it. It speaks to the kind of innermost part of someone. You have a spirit. It’s the thing that drives you, the things that helps you make the decisions that you make. It’s more than just a brain, and it’s not quite a heart, but it’s some kind of thing that seems to be the inner center of you.

So we use that language. So when we talk about spirit and a Holy Spirit. We’re talking about God’s kind of life giving power now. Now that’s not a fair description in some ways ’cause it doesn’t give personality. This language here is definitely given like the personhood of it’s a he.

It’s not an it, but somewhere in this understanding of God, there is Father, there is Son, and there is Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit is the one that connects with us as people most. Distinctly, lemme try and explain it to you this way. This is a piece of language from a writer, Frederick Beater, that I quote maybe more than I should.

The common view is that life itself. Whatever life is, does not care one way or another any more than the ocean cares whether we swim in it or drown in it. In honesty, one has to admit that a great deal of evidence supports that view. So let’s begin with that first part for just a second.

Some years ago I was out surfing. And I got caught in a set of waves where I was in one wave and it pulled me under and I just about managed to get to the surface and I took a breath, and then the next wave came and it knocked me down again and got back to the surface. And again, the third wave came.

So every time I’m just gasping for air. And as much as I’m able to think in that moment, I’m deeply aware that this thing that you might call an ocean doesn’t care what the end result is. I distinctly want to live, but the ocean’s just impartial to it. It doesn’t matter to the ocean one way or another.

It doesn’t have that capacity to think. When you look at the world around us, some people might say, oh man, this world just, it’s all just about chance. You never know what’s going to happen. This is what Frederick Beater says about this, and I just love this quote, so wanted to share it with you, but rightly or wrongly, the Christian faith flatly contradicts it to say that God is Spirit is to say that life does care.

That the life giving power, that life itself comes from is not indifferent to whether we sink or swim. It wants us to swim. It suggests that God who was part of this world, who made this world from its very origins is deeply on the side of humanity, wants us to come to know him, wants us to enter into this story of Jesus once.

Good for us, when we look at life and say, this feels at times like it has no purpose. The Christian scriptures have contradicted that and says no, life does matter. And God, he loves you and he cares for you and wants you to enter into a relationship with him. And when. When we have a savior that loves us, who is distant, who is somewhere else, now the Holy Spirit was the gift to the church that says this.

Is the way that you interact with God. This is the God that lives within us. Is Paul’s language, one of the first followers of Jesus. But if God himself, he says, through the Holy Spirit has taken up residence in your life, you could hardly be thinking more of yourself than of him. Anyone, of course, who is not welcome this invisible, but clearly present.

God, the spirit of Christ won’t know what we’re talking about. But for you who welcoming him in, who dwell who in whom he dwells? Even though you still experience all the limitations of sin, you yourself experience life on God’s terms. The language of Holy Spirit suggests that God actually lives with you.

This was one of the great surprises to the early church. They were surprised when Jesus died. Equally surprised when he came back to life again, and then surprised another time when they were told that now God is not just separate from you, maybe just on you, but actually dwells within you. That’s the language of the New Testament one that at times in some denominations like Presbyterian, which is our heritage, is sometimes difficult language.

To express Gordon Fee. A New Testament writer says, the spirit as an experienced and living reality was absolutely cr was the absolutely crucial matter for Christian life from beginning to end. So we have this moment where this first group of followers of Jesus experienced God for themselves. Now, indwelling them is the language, and then we see the reaction to it.

So this is it. Now that we’re staying in Jerusalem, God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When he heard the sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment because each one heard their own language being spoken. These first followers of Jesus began to speak in real languages of the people visiting this festival in Jerusalem.

Then we get to see their response to that. And you might ask yourself, what would my response to that be? Because it’s definitely unusual as we see the response. There’s these three groups of people that emerge. There’s the insiders, the disciples, the followers of Jesus. And then there’s a second group that are the curious.

The ones who actually want to know what’s going on, who are interested in this supernatural event that’s taking place in front of them. And then of course, as there is in any moment, there’s the dismissive, the ones that say, there’s no way this thing can possibly be real. So the curious, they ask three questions.

That’s what curious people do. A couple of them may be a less important, but one to us I think is really important. This is their response to this supernatural event. Utterly amazed. They asked, aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans? Question one, then how is it each of us hears them in our own native language when they say, aren’t these Galileans they actually mean aren’t these.

Simple folk, when they thought of Galileans, they thought of the uneducated. Over my years of trying to translate this passage to people, which is now a lot and in a bunch of different locations, I’ve used some different examples. When I was in England, I used to talk about aren’t these the Scottish folk or the Irish folk?

When I lived in Michigan, I said, aren’t these those from Ohio? When I lived here, I’ve said, aren’t these those from Nebraska or Kansas? And those answers always seem to get me into trouble because there’s always someone who is from one of those places. In the building. So I won’t use any for those examples this time but it’s people that are a little, like slower, a little less educated.

They hear lots of languages being spoken and they say, how can it be these kinds of people that have this capacity to communicate with so many people in so many different languages? We hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues. There’s a supernatural thing going on here that can’t be explained by education, especially in those that are uneducated.

And then finally, this last question, amazed and perplexed, which means like outside of their body, just dead on confused, they asked one another. What does this mean? What? What does it mean? Is there question the dismissive, instead of asking questions they make one statement that looks like this and it’s such a brilliant response.

Some, however, made fun of them and said they have had too much wine, which is a way of explaining anything that you don’t know how to explain. We might just for a moment, sympathize with this group. They’re seeing something that’s never been seen before. And if you’ve been in that setting, you know what that feels like.

I, I was in the Philippines when I was 20. We were in this remote village, and there was a gentleman in this village that had lived in the basement of a house for the last 55 years, only coming up very briefly. For the most part, nobody had ever seen him. And so when we started to ask why we got into this conversation and they started to tell a story about how he was raised by the witch doctor of the town.

And as a kid, he used to fly up to the top of the hill with a witch doctor and walk down on the tops of trees. And I, as a good westerner and just that’s ridiculous. I’m trying actually, physically not to laugh, and then I look around and everybody with me who’s been in more of these settings has got like this deadly serious look on their face.

I don’t know whether that story’s true to this day, but I just recognized how easy it is just to say, this is, this has got to be nonsense. There’s no way this can be true. This is, this response of this second crowd seems like universally. This is true in those kind of moments. Curious people ask questions, dismissive people make statements.

It seems like the best thing that we can do wherever we are in following Jesus is to be curious, to constantly ask more questions, to get more information. So in an effort to be curious, let’s ask their third question. So what does this mean? What is this story supposed to be telling us? Why does this story from a couple of thousand years ago matter today?

What changes on the day of Pentecost other than a bunch of fairly inept leaders become good leaders? And there’s a couple of macro stories that have run across the whole of scripture that seem to be changing here in front of us. The first one is clued to us by the day. When the day of Pentecost came, the day of Pentecost was already a festival day.

It came from a Hebrew tradition called Shava Wat. According to legend, it was the day that a group of people that had been freed from a land called Egypt who had escaped slavery. We’re taken out into a wilderness, into a desert, and in the midst of that desert, God spoke to them and gave them 10 commandments initially, and then about 613 rules in total on how to live.

If you were to read that story, you’d see that Passover is the day that Jesus dies, and then about 40 days pass, and then you have this moment a few days later. On Pentecost when the Holy Spirit is given. If you were a good Jewish person following Jesus, waiting to see what happened, waiting for Jesus’ promise.

There’s just a chance that as you got closer and closer to the day of SHA T, you’d start to say, man, I wonder if this is the day. If Jesus promised something would change, this is a day that makes sense. About 1500 years before this day, God gave people a law. Ways to follow him, rules to live by, and then on this day, he gives them his spirit.

Everything changes in that moment. Law in that moment is replaced by this indwelling that tells you as a follower of Jesus, how you are called to live. It’s no longer an external thing that you’re trying to be. It’s obey. It’s something deeply internal. Just think about that for a moment. All our effort.

All our intention, all our desire to, to prove ourselves our suspicion that we’re not just good enough is answered in that moment or the ways that you might say, I’ve failed at different points answered in this moment. It’s no longer a law thing. It’s now a spirit thing. You’re now actually released to this kind of idea.

It’s no longer about just trying. Try is replaced by rely. The message of Pentecost is this, that God says, you, you actually are empowered now to live how I want you to live. That gets to come from somewhere internal. It’s not just purely you muscling through doing your best to make it happen. One of the famous examples around this is that it’s like trying to run a marathon.

If you just jump up now, you can’t do it no matter how hard you try. You can put in your best effort, but you just can’t do it unless you’ve been training somewhere. Something has changed. Now, for us as humans, we get to rely on the Holy Spirit to lead us in the way of Jesus. And then the second macro story is this.

I cut out a whole list of people because it’s hard to track with. It’s the people that are in this group of curious and dismissive. All over the place. They are Ians Meads Mites, residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, and Cappadocia ponchos in Asia, friar and Phi Egypt, and the parts of Libya near siren visitors from Rome, both Jews and converts to Rome, IANS, and Arabs all over the place.

Why are these people in this story? Many of you or some of you’ll remember, we did a sermon not long ago on the Tower of Babel. This moment where the whole of humanity is confused and their language is changed. Why are these people here? ’cause it’s the same people. This actually misses out a whole bunch of nations that exist and may well have been present.

But these are all the mo, all the people that, that across history were in that moment at Babel now with their names updated somewhere. This story is this is what’s taking place, Babel. Is reversed. This moment of disunity of splitting is reversed. Disunity in the moment of Pentecost is replaced by community.

We’re now talking in Acts chapter two about this idea. It’s new kinds of people in a new kind of community. That’s the hope of Pentecost, that you and I get to look like that. Transformed people. Not ’cause we’re good at obeying rules, but because God dwells within us and a different community because we are together, transformed people living in different ways.

That’s the answer to the selfish nature that talked about at the time. My sense of I need to win, my sense of I need to thrive. It’s now no longer about me, it’s as much about you for me. As it is about me, that’s the hope of this story. Those two things are interconnected. If you at this point are someone who’s getting baptized, who’s celebrating that kind of new life, I’m gonna invite you to make your way outside and we’re gonna read one more passage of scripted to look at what this two ideas look like together.

That day, about 3000 took him, Peter, at his word. They were baptized and were signed up. They committed themselves to the teaching of the apostles, the life together, the common meal and prayers. Everyone around was in awe and all these wonders and signs done through the apostles. All the believers lived in a wonderful harmony holding everything in common.

They sold whatever they owned and pooled their resources so that each person’s need was met. They followed a daily discipline of worship in the temple, followed by meals at home. Every meal is celebration, exuberant and joyful as they praised God. People in general liked what they saw, and every day their number grew as God added to those who were saved.

We live in a world that looks nothing often like that. And we as people of God, people who are entering into what God has done in us, living in community together get to show just how good life following Jesus really is. So a couple of quick questions for you. What stops you living like this? Is there something that’s like a block to it?

Brett and Manning, the writer says, in my experience, self-hatred is the dominant malaise, crippling Christians and stifling their growth in the Holy Spirit. It’s the some sense that says in you, I’m just not fit for this. This isn’t for me, this is for other people. I’m the one that this kind of story can’t help.

It’s just not the truth. The invite of Jesus is for everyone. This is Jesus’ own words in Luke chapter 11. Which of you fathers? If your son asked for a fish, we’ll give him a snake instead. Or if he asks for an egg, we’ll give him a scorpion. If you then know you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?

This story is for all and open to all. And so maybe one final question, how might you respond to this? The beautiful story of Jesus is this, that really, this kind of story is for those who are willing to come to the end of themselves, say that I don’t have all the answers, don’t have the basis covered, don’t have all the questions solved, don’t have all the doubts dissolved, but I’m here longing for Jesus to do something in my life.

What stops you from responding to that? At Jesus. As we enter into the joy of baptisms, as we celebrate lives change, new stories emerging from old, we remind ourselves that’s Rob’s story as we think of him. New story, out of an old story. Thank you for these people that are entering into new life. We celebrate with them and are grateful.

Thank you for this day of Pentecost, which 2000 years ago changed everything. It took the death and resurrection of Jesus and it embedded it deeply in our lives. We now live with you, within us, for us shaping us, changing us. Everything we do now is through you and for you. God, help us to obey that core this week.

Amen.