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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed! Alleluia!)
When you hear the word “Pentecost”, what first comes to your mind? Pentecostal congregations and their unique worship practices? Or, does the word first bring to your mind the Old Testament harvest festival, also called the Feast of Weeks or the Day of Firstfruits, the same day on which Moses was thought to have received God’s law on the fiery top of Mount Sinai? More likely, the word “Pentecost” first brings to your and my minds the fiftieth day after the Resurrection of Our Lord, the day on which God the Father sent the Holy Spirit as His Son Jesus had promised—as promised, for example, in today’s Gospel Reading. With that Gospel Reading in mind, the theme for this sermon on this Day of Pentecost is “The Sending of the Holy Spirit”.
As for the past few weeks, today’s Gospel Readings is from St. John’s divinely‑inspired account of Jesus’s teaching on the night when He was betrayed, but today we have gone further back in that teaching. Jesus had been both helping His disciples deal with the shock of His departure and strengthening them for their life and work after His departure. Then, one of Jesus’s disciples asked Jesus how it was that Jesus would manifest Himself to them but not to the world, and Jesus answered that anyone who loves Him will keep His Word and the Father will love that person and they will come to that person and make their home with that person. And, Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit, Whom the Father would send in Jesus’s Name, would teach them all things and bring to their remembrance all that Jesus said to them. Jesus said a number of other things to them in today’s Gospel Reading alone, but that promise of the Holy Spirit is perhaps most relevant to our observance of Pentecost this day. And we do well to take note of the context in which Jesus made that promise of the Holy Spirit: a context of people who love Him also keeping His Word.
In the Gospel Reading, Jesus says people who love Him will keep His Word, and, conversely, Jesus says people who do not love Him do not keep His Word. Which kind of people are we? Are you and I one of those who love Him and keep His Word? Or, are you and I one of those who do not love Him and do not keep His Word? I expect that most of us here today would at least say that we love Jesus, but do we show that love in how we regard His Word? Do we reject parts of His Word, perhaps because we do not like what they say about others or even about ourselves? Or, do we accept all of His Word but nevertheless fail to let it have its way with our lives? Does the severity of our sin maybe even reach the point where we might drive the Holy Spirit from us and thereby make ourselves need to be re-converted to the faith?
By nature we all need to be converted to the faith to begin with. By nature we are dead in trespasses and sins, so, if it were up to us alone, we would never love Jesus or keep His Word. By nature we are also hostile to God and resist His Spirit, so, even after we are converted, our sinful nature does not want to love Jesus and keep His Word. By nature we are like the people of the Old Testament Reading (Genesis 11:1-9), who trusted in themselves to make their own name and so earned God’s judgment in the forms of His confusing their language and dispersing them over the face of all the earth. God uses the fact that the devil, the ruler of this world, can rightly lay claim to us by nature to help lead us to repent: that is, to turn in sorrow from our sin, to trust God to forgive our sin, and to want to better. When we so repent, then God the Father forgives our sin. God the Father forgives our sin for the sake of His Son Jesus, on Whom the devil had no claim.
The devil had no claim on Jesus, Who is true God and true man, because Jesus’s being true God kept His human nature from sinning. Yet, in the Gospel Reading, Jesus can say that at that time, according to His human nature, He was less than His Father, having humbled Himself and become obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross (Philippians 2:5-8). He died on the cross and rose from the grave in order to save us from our sins. When we believe that Jesus died and rose for us, then God the Father forgives our sin. He forgives our sin of not showing our love for Jesus, of rejecting parts of His Word, of not letting His Word have its way with our lives, or whatever our sin might be. By grace through faith, He forgives all our sin, and He even forgives our sinful natures.
Our forgiveness is inextricably connected to “The Sending of the Holy Spirit”. At the end of the Gospel Reading, Jesus apparently got up and went out from the upper room where He had been with His disciples, and, after He apparently somewhere else concluded His final teaching of His disciples, He went to the cross for us. After finishing His sacrifice for our redemption by dying on the cross, Jesus bowed His head and gave up His Spirit (John 19:30). After showing the Father accepted His sacrifice for us by rising from the grave, Jesus appeared to His disciples and breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:22). Quoting from the Old Testament prophet Joel (Joel 2:28-32), Peter in his sermon on Pentecost, part of which we heard in today’s Second Reading (Acts 2:1-21), made clear that the pouring out of the Holy Spirit leads people to call on the name of the Lord and so be saved. Today’s Gradual uses a verse from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans and so reminds us that “With the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved” (Romans 10:10). The Holy Spirit, Who works such belief in the heart and confession with the mouth has been present since before creation and is freely available to all, working through the Father’s Word, spoken by the Son, brought to the disciples’ remembrance by the Holy Spirit.
A special gift of the Holy Spirit came that Pentecost Day with a sound like a mighty rushing wind, divided tongues as of fire appeared to the disciples and rested on each one of them, and that special gift of the Holy Spirit enabled them to speak in the languages of the Jews gathered in Jerusalem for the Old Testament harvest festival. Transcending the confusion of languages and dispersion of Babel, the Holy Spirit thereby gathered a harvest of about 3‑thousand souls into the Church. The Holy Spirit likewise gathers us into the Church, not through language miracles but as we hear the pure preaching of the Gospel and, in keeping with that Gospel, receive the sacraments of Holy Baptism, Holy Absolution, and Holy Communion. Through these means of grace, we who believe receive the forgiveness of sins and so have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ (Romans 5:1). Through these means of grace, the Father sends the Holy Spirit and Jesus leaves us His peace. Through these means of grace, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit come and make their home with us, our bodies and our souls, perhaps most‑concretely as we eat the bread that is Jesus’s body and drink the wine that is His blood. Receiving forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation in these ways, there is no reason for our hearts to be troubled or afraid.
This past week, Lutheran bishop Thor Henrik With of Norway was put out of both his office of bishop and the holy ministry, essentially because He loved Jesus and kept Jesus’s Word, particularly that Word relating to same-sex relationships. Bishop With wrote that he felt comfort and peace during the meeting with those who put him out, and he does not see his expulsion as catastrophic, because he knows, as Jesus describes in the Gospel Reading, the necessity of such separation between those who love Jesus and keep His Word and those who do not love Jesus and do not keep His Word. No matter what the word “Pentecost” first brings to our mind, Jesus’s “Sending of the Holy Spirit” to us in His Word and Sacraments leads us to repent and believe and so to be forgiven of our failures to love Him Jesus and keep His Word. Jesus’s “Sending of the Holy Spirit” brings forth in our lives the fruit of faith—the confession of our lips, even under persecution, and acts of love toward God in the persons of our neighbors. Jesus’s “Sending of the Holy Spirit” ultimately gives us the eternal mystical union and peace of heaven. So, as the Church has prayed since at least the eleventh century, and as we have prayed already this morning with the Introit antiphon, the Appointed Verse, and Martin Luther’s paraphrase of that same liturgical text in the Hymn of the Day, we now pray again: “Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of the faithful, and kindle in them the fire of your love. Alleluia.”
Amen.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed! Alleluia!)
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +