The Ministry Of The Holy Spirit
Acts 2:1-21
In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.
John 14:26 “But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you.”
Dear fellow redeemed in Christ our Lord… We Lutherans all too often get “beat up” by those in other confessions of faith who say that we don’t pay enough attention to the Holy Spirit. Their confession of faith, we would argue in return, is almost ALL about the Holy Spirit and too little about Jesus. Then they would respond and say we’re always talking about Jesus and what He said and did, but the Holy Spirit barely gets a mention. If they had been in our church for the past several weeks, they would have heard the Holy Spirit mentioned numerous times, so there is that.
Well, what of it? Should the Holy Spirit get equal time? Should we be talking more about the power of the Spirit in our lives? But think about those questions. What specifically is the power of the Holy Spirit in our lives? St. Paul answers that question in Romans 1:16 when he says, “I am not ashamed of the Gospel, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes.” The power of the Holy Spirit is not just some generic force to make things happen or to make us better people. The power of the Holy Spirit is the very Gospel of the forgiveness of sins in Christ the crucified. Therefore, the Holy Spirit – surprise! – is all about Jesus! The preaching of the Gospel is when the power of the Holy Spirit is being exercised, when that Gospel is being proclaimed, bringing people to faith in Christ and sustaining them in the faith. For where there is forgiveness of sins, there is also new life and salvation.
So the truth of the matter is that whenever Christ is being preached, you can be sure that the Holy Spirit is present and doing His work. Jesus said in John 16:14, “The Holy Spirit will glorify Me, for He will take of what is Mine and declare it to you.” And in today’s Gospel reading Jesus said, “The Holy Spirit will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you.” The Holy Spirit’s ministry is all about Jesus. The Spirit’s job is not to be center stage Himself, but to point to Christ and bring glory to Christ. In fact, if you hear a lot of talk about the Holy Spirit just by Himself, or about healings and speaking in tongues and the Spirit’s power in your life apart from Christ, that is actually way off the mark. The Spirit is He who proceeds from the Father and the Son and who is one with them in God’s purpose of bringing life to the world through Christ.
The events of Pentecost serve to make this point. For when all is said and done, what are the main things that happened on Pentecost Day? If you read all the way through the 2nd chapter of Acts, you see that the Gospel of Christ was preached, people were baptized into Christ for the forgiveness of their sins, and believers gathered together for the liturgy of the Lord’s Supper, the breaking of the bread. There were other wonderful, miraculous things about Pentecost Day which God gave on this unique and special occasion. But the key thing, the most important thing about this day is that the Holy Spirit was poured out to deliver the gifts of Christ.
The first thing to notice about this event is that the believers were all gathered together in one place. It was the 3rd hour of the day, 9 a.m. on a Sunday morning, we might say. That’s where the Spirit came, to that gathering, which is a reminder of the verse in Hebrews 10:25, “Let us not forsake the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the [Last] Day approaching.”
And there were two signs which accompanied the coming of the Holy Spirit among this little band of Jesus’ followers. The first was the sound of a mighty, rushing wind. This wind was the breath of God; God was breathing His Spirit and His life into His Church. It reminds us of how Adam was created, when Yahweh God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and Adam became a living being” (Gen 2:7). In the same way, the Holy Spirit is the breath of life and the soul of the body which is the Church. This rushing wind is also reminiscent of how God caused a wind to blow over the waters after the flood, drying the land and bringing about a new creation. In the same way, the Spirit blows across the waters of baptism to make us a new creation in Christ.
The second sign was the tongues of fire that came to rest upon the disciples. As in the burning bush where God spoke to Moses, and as in the pillar of fire that led the children of Israel in the wilderness, so also here, the fire shows that the Spirit of God, the 3rd Person of the Holy Trinity, is present for and with His people to lead and guide them.
And, of course, there’s a little play on words here: there were tongues of fire, and they were able to speak with other tongues. The fiery presence of the Holy Spirit made the disciples able to speak in other languages which they had not learned before this. And please note that these were known languages in the world of that day. Sometimes, when so-called Pentecostals talk about speaking in tongues, they are generally not talking about any language that would be understood today, just ecstatic babbling.
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The same is true for us gathered here today. The word of forgiveness won by a man who spoke Aramaic and Hebrew, the word of forgiveness preached by apostles who spoke Greek, the word of forgiveness confessed by much of the church in Latin and later translated by Luther into German, this word has come to you in your own language, in the English tongue. That is God’s gift to you. There is no more personal way of saying that Jesus is your Savior than to say it in your own language. The Gospel of Christ is for you. That, by the way, is what it means to be truly Pentecostal.
Of course, the very fact that there are all these languages in the world is a reminder of why Jesus had to come and die in the first place. God caused the confusion of languages at Babel because of our self-exalting sin. In order to humble people like us – people who want to make a name for ourselves and who are not content with what we were created to be – God scatters us. The confusion of languages illustrates what our sin does: it separates us from others; and most of all, it separates us from God.
What functions as our tower of Babel today is the internet and our advanced technology. Now, there is nothing wrong with technology or the internet or tall towers in and of themselves. But in the hands of sinful human beings, these tools tend to magnify and multiply sin and its power and its consequences. And even though these things have the potential to bring people together for good, in the end they are always vying to become idols that we love because they serve our desires and they enable us to make a name for ourselves apart from God’s will.
It is strange and yet not surprising that while technology has made the world seem smaller and more of a global community, we are as tribal and polarized as we’ve ever been – in our politics, in our workplaces, even in our own homes. For greater power and potential in the hands of sinners inevitably causes greater separation from God and from one another. Even among those of the same tongue, we are not always speaking the same language.
However, Pentecost is the reversal of Babel. Whereas Babel caused the people to be scattered and separated, at Pentecost all the people of various languages are brought together in Christ. Even as Jesus was crucified with the accusation above His head written in three different languages, so He redeemed all those of every nation and tribe and people and language, releasing them from their sins by His precious blood.
Christ has broken down the barrier of sin and pulverized it under His feet. He has put us right with God the Father by His holy death; and by doing so, He has also put us right with one another. The walls of hurt and division which separate us are overcome by Christy’s mercy and forgiveness that we share with and among each other. The risen Jesus sends out His Spirit to draw us together and make us one in Himself. No tower, no technology, no human achievement can truly unite us and lift us up to the heavens. Only Jesus can do that. And the Holy Spirit has come to proclaim that to the world.
Now there were those on Pentecost who rejected the Holy Spirit. Some mocked the disciples who were speaking in other tongues, saying, “They are full of new wine.” And yet those mockers were actually more correct than they realized. In Mark 2:22 Jesus had said, “No one puts new wine into old wineskins; or else the new wine bursts the wineskins . . . But new wine must be put into new wineskins.” The wine of the Old Testament was poured from the old wineskins of the prophets. But now in these latter days of the new testament, the apostles are the new wineskins. For Christ Himself is the great grape cluster, for He was crushed in His suffering and passion, that He might bring forth the wine of the Spirit. Here indeed, then, the apostles are filled with this new wine of the Holy Spirit, that they might bring life and joy to the nations. It is written of the days of the Messiah that “the mountains shall drip with new wine, and all the hills shall flow with it” (Joel 3:18). Here we see the beginning of those days, days in which we still live.
Truly, the prophesy of Joel is still coming to pass, where God says, “On My menservants and on My maidservants I will pour out My Spirit in those days; and they shall prophesy” (Joel 2:28). To prophesy here simply means to speak and confess the word of God; to speak God’s Word to God’s people. It is what we are doing here today in the liturgy, as we speak and sing and confess the words of God given us by the Holy Spirit. You are the Lord’s menservants and maidservants, for God’s Spirit was quite literally poured out on you in Holy Baptism. You are the ones gathered by the Spirit around the altar as one body; for there you receive the true body of Christ. You are those who look for the coming of great and awesome day of the Lord, who call on the name of the Lord and shall be saved. For no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit.
So then, we get to keep and hold on to Jesus’ Word. That Word comes from the Father and is filled with the Holy Spirit. Through this Word the persons of the Holy Trinity come to you and make their home with you. By this Word you have peace that the world cannot give, the everlasting peace of Christ. And when you come to His Table this day and are dismissed with the words, “Depart in peace,” you most definitely have received Christ who is Peace Himself. And then you get to say Amen – gift received.
In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.
