My business life has been product development. I’ve learned you can’t create new products unless you practice seeing what is not yet visible. You need to have a vision of something that doesn’t exist. Adult humans are not good at that. The problem is not brain-power. Some estimate we humans use less than 10% of our brain capacity. We have plenty of processing power. What we’re missing is the openness to envision something new.
I always harp on the fact that we humans are still evolving, that we’re not finished yet, we haven’t reached our potential, we ARE the missing link on the way to true humanity. This is certainly true in the spiritual sense - we, as a species, are a long way from our God-given potential. We are a product in the process of development. What is the vision? And how do we get there?
The New Testament teaches we have to become like children again to see, never mind enter into the kingdom of heaven. How do we do that? We’re grown-ups. Well, God knows this. We need to open up. Jesus taught we need to become like children again, opened up to seeing the invisible. We need to be transformed. We need the gift of the Holy Spirit.
One of the most underappreciated gifts we’ve been given is God’s Holy Spirit. We acknowledge the Spirit in our creeds. And when we wrap up our prayers the Spirit gets honorable mention in a “praise phrase” as the Holy Ghost. We all agree it’s a great present. It’s just most of us haven’t unwrapped it yet.
As Jesus requested, on Pentecost G-d the father sent us the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is G-d the coach and teacher, the spiritual trainer who teaches us all things. What it teaches changes us, transforms us. And, if we let it do its work, the Holy Spirit will transform our mind, body and soul into the full human beings God wants us to be. But only if we unwrap our gift, read the simple instructions, and use it – use it all year long.
Transformation is a big claim. But the first Pentecost was a “change your life” event. You remember how the early disciples were amazed, awestruck at the new confidence and ability that flowed through them. Jesus had delivered the Father’s message that there was a new Law in town both simpler and more challenging: Love God with all your being, and love your neighbor as yourself. A new way to see life and approach life. A transformation. God the Father knew we messy humans couldn’t do it alone. God the Father knew - and knows - that our human nature, our pride, our greed, our fear, our hungers, all these normal human drives get in the way of being loving Christians, builders of His kingdom.
So as Jesus promised, the Father on Pentecost sent the Spirit to strengthen us and to guide us through our transformation from moderately smart animals into full humans who know what God wants, who want what God wants, and who do what God wants. That’s a radical evolution that can only happen and move forward with the Spirit. The Spirit who gives us ordinary men and women and children incredible gifts, gifts of spiritual power. We’d be lost without it!
Pentecost was the real birthday of the church, the day many had a personal experience of God. It was more than speaking in tongues. It was God’s call to be transformed. The gift of the Holy Spirit lets us experience the world differently, with transformed physical senses and a new mind. Since that first Pentecost a new set of powers is available to all of mankind. But we have to practice using them.
Pentecost was actually an old established holiday for the Jewish People. By Jesus’ time on earth, this feast had already been a holy day of sacrifice for over 1,000 years. It was the first Thanksgiving. Its Hebrew name was Shavuot, which means “weeks” since it was celebrated seven weeks and a day after the Passover Seder.
On that day 2,000 years ago, 50 days after Passover, Jerusalem was filled with Jews and pagan converts and God-lovers from all over the Mediterranean came to celebrate Thanksgiving in the Holy City. But this Shavuot was something special.
It started in a house probably close to the Temple. The disciples were indoors, yet they heard a roaring sound like a powerful wind as the Holy Spirit descended on them. They began speaking ecstatically in foreign languages. They rushed out into the street and crowds gathered around. Jews from every nation in the Mideast and beyond heard and understood what was being boldly shouted out by these uneducated disciples from the sticks. They heard, each in their own language, Praise be to God! God has done wonders! Hallelujah! Glory to God in the highest! And maybe they were also hearing that this day their sins were forgiven, their old lives of depression and fear and pointlessness were over. Be healed in mind and body! Come and believe what Jeshua teaches is true! Be baptized into the new life of the Spirit! The Holy Spirit!
The Holy Spirit comes to whomever is open to receive it. Three-thousand Jews believed and stepped forward for baptism that Pentecost, and that day the church was born. It wasn’t the wise and experienced rabbis who experienced the fearlessness, energy and insight the Spirit gives. It was ordinary working men and women and children who yielded to the Spirit’s rush of energy and strength and confidence.
The Spirit empowers and enthuses. And these ordinary people found themselves filled with the Spirit of God. And thank God there was a crowd shouting and praising God. One person might have felt awkward and tried to squash this new feeling bubbling up inside. But surrounded by others experiencing the same new and exciting, loud, disorderly, yet respectful and godly joy, they encouraged one another.
After all, Christianity is not an individual sport. Christ wants us to encourage and uplift one another. Christianity is very much a team event. And it doesn’t really matter to God whether your team wears orange or green, red or blue. Christianity is a community experience given to ordinary people like us. Christianity needs community, and a Chrisitan community is a community of God-lovers all capable of being filled with the Holy Spirit.
It wasn’t always this way. Before the coming of Jesus, the Holy Spirit was restricted to special people for God’s special purposes. We call these people prophets. Today, in answer to Jesus’ request, God has sent his Holy Spirit on everyone who asks.
Our readings give us examples of the experience of people who opened the gift and those who didn’t. A very young man heard God announcing that he, Jeremiah, was appointed to be a prophet to the nations before he was born. Jeremiah answers, “Ah, Lord, I’m just a boy – I do not know how to speak.” The Lord touches Jeremiah’s mouth saying, “Now I have put my words into your mouth.” And so it was.
In Luke’s Gospel Jesus is teaching in one of the synagogues – it was Friday evening or Saturday morning – Shabat. On the Sabbath no work is to be done. The purpose of the Sabbath we now know is for people to interrupt their routines and reflect on the presence and reality of God. A woman bent almost double came to the Shabat service. She suffered from a spiritual condition, the presence of an inhibiting spirit which had crippled her for eighteen years. Jesus saw her, called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment!”
When he laid hands on her she immediately straightened up and began praising God. The leader of the synagogue was indignant because Jesus healed her on the Sabbath. The rabbi carped: There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.
Jesus responds, "You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?"
The worshippers all rejoiced at the spiritual healing. The newly liberated woman joyfully received the gift. The rabbi did not.
Those who open their gift act with quiet energy and purpose, confidence and ability. Have you asked for the gifts? If you’ve asked and received, what are you doing with this new high wattage power? Are our lives and hearts transformed so we see and act with God’s love? Do we trust God and throw ourselves into what we are trying to do with energy and conviction that the Spirit will give us the wherewithal and perseverance to make it happen?
The Holy Spirit is there for us. The first words I heard as a Christian - from ROMANS 12: Conform no longer to the pattern of this present world, but be transformed by the renewal of your minds. ****
This is the power of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit will fill you with strength and teach you, not as book learning, but as an experience of God’s love and spiritual power.
Sister Diane Bergant, now 88 years old, taught the new American Pope theology 45 years ago. On a podcast she pictured the Holy Spirit as “the dynamic power of G-d active or waiting to be active in the world. It’s a very homey kind of metaphor, but think of the water system in your house. It’s there with power in the water, but you gotta turn on the faucet for it to come out. That’s how G-d participates in our lives. That’s how G-d accomplishes.”
God is not finished. Through Jesus, God has announced we are ready for the next step in our long evolutionary process. Paul calls it transformation. Jesus sent the Spirit to us to teach us all things. We’ve got the power of the Spirit waiting for us.
I urge you to open up the faucet. Turn it on. Experience this Pentecost gift. It’s yours. Feel it. Let it move you and change you. Do your part in God’s creation. Let yourself be transformed. Open the gift. Live it. Experience it. God sent it for you. “Turn on the faucet.”