[Mcgregorpage] McGregorPage #608, Pentecost, 5/11/08

[rmcgregoralbq at aol.com]

Pentecost – May 11, 2008

Acts 2:1 21
Psalm 104:24 34, 35b
1 Corinthians 12:3b 13 
 John 7:37 39

The Big Bang

Pentecost is the church's big bang.  Exploding out of that energy-laden center are all of the church's gifts and all of the church's potential: the utterance of wisdom, the utterance of knowledge, faith, gifts of healing, the working of miracles, prophecy, the discernment of spirits, various kinds of tongues, the interpretation of tongues and even the forgiveness of sin.  The expansion of this spiritual universe is endless renewal, reformation, democratization and unification.  Anthropologists try to explain the church in terms of human proclivity, sociologists in terms of human interaction and historians in terms of institutions and leaders.  But the truth about the church is a spiritual explosion initiating the expansion of a spiritual universe moving today as it did on the day of the big bang.

It surely must have been with this understanding that John adds the parenthetical comment, "Now he said this about the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive; for as yet there was no Spirit, because Jesus was not yet glorified."  (John 7:39)  Clearly the Hebrew Scriptures report on the work of God in terms of spirit, but the impact of Pentecost on the church was such a big bang as to set aside anything that preceded it.  In the scientific community too, there is little talk about what would have preceded the big bang.  It is not that no history exists before; it is just that the big bang subsumes history.

Notice the connection between the coming of the Holy Spirit as John describes it and the creation of Adam as Genesis describes it.  God breathed into little Adam the breath of life, "nephesh".  It is another form of "nephesh" that Jesus breaths into the disciples.  The first "nephesh", Old Testament scholar Bill Power, described as "a bundle of desires" like a nest of baby birds, beaks wide open, straining upward toward the meal in the mother's mouth.  At Pentecost, "nephesh" the yearning becomes "nephesh" the empowering -- one giver, one Spirit, one gift in two parts, the second seeming to subsume the first, empowerment setting aside yearning, but really they go together.  Pentecost is the completion of God's gift of life.  For this reason we talk about it as if there were no history of the Spirit before, but of course there was.

There is a history to the work of the Holy Spirit, but history doesn't grasp the Spirit.  We can use history to claim that Christians have it and Jews don't, but that would be an abuse of the revelation.  Time is not important to the Spirit.  The big bang is for everyone.  It is the beginning of everyone's time, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu...  One of the manifestations of the neo-Pentecostal movement, the last half of the 20th century, was the fellowship across denominational lines among Pentecostals -- Roman Catholic, Episcopal, Methodist and "old line Pentecostals".   Where years of hostility had frustrated theological and ecclesiastical unity, focusing on the work of the Holy Spirit has brought Christians together.  It is as if we had all been ducks in separate fenced-in pens until the flood came and the water rose above the top of the fences.  Suddenly, we were all riding the same wave.

When we focus on the gifts of the Spirit and the fruits of the Spirit, we discover that we have brothers and sisters across all historical and theological barriers.  Where we find the fruit of the Spirit -- love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control -- we have found God's completed creation.  Where we find the gifts of the Spirit, the utterance of wisdom, the utterance of knowledge, faith, gifts of healing, the working of miracles,  prophecy,  the discernment of spirits,  various kinds of tongues,  the interpretation of tongues and the forgiveness of sin, we find the church.

And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language, Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindu, Buddhists?


May these thoughts strengthen you. 
 
An Open Letter to Fellow Pastors 
>From Roland McGregor, United Methodist Pastor 
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