“BEING PENTECOSTAL: ENCOUNTERS WITH THE HOLY SPIRIT”

Rev. James Singleton

5/23/10
ACTS 2:1-21

Rev. Fred Craddock, retired Disciples of Christ minister and preaching professor tells about the time he was confronted with a question that baffled him.  He says, "A few years ago when I was on the West Coast to speak at a seminary, just before the first lecture, one of the students stood up and said, ‘Before you speak, I need to know if you are Pentecostal.’  

"The room grew silent. I didn’t know where the dean was! The student quizzed me in front of everybody. I was taken aback, and so I said, ‘Do you mean if I belong to the Pentecostal church?

"He said, ‘No, I mean are you Pentecostal?’

"I said, ‘Are you asking if I am charismatic?’

"He said, ‘I am asking if you are Pentecostal.’

"I said, ‘Do you want to know if I speak in tongues?’

"He said, ‘I want to know if you are Pentecostal.’

"I said, ‘I don’t know what your question is.’

"He said, ‘Obviously, you are not Pentecostal.’ He left." (Fred B. Craddock, Craddock Stories, ed. Mike Graves and Richard F. Ward, 22.)  

How would you have responded to that young man’s question? Are you Pentecostal? Am I Pentecostal? My first reaction to the word Pentecostal is negative. It conjures up holy rollers, speaking in strange tongues, and other oddities associated with those who are caught up in the Holy Spirit. In fact, I would venture to say that of all the major Christian holidays, Pentecost is our least celebrated and certainly least understood.

How many of you have a portrait of the Holy Spirit displayed in your home? I didn’t think so. The Holy Spirit is the facet of God that gives us the most trouble. Pentecost comes along and reminds us of what we don’t need reminded of—God is invisible. We can’t put our finger on him. We can’t lay our eyes upon him. It is because God is Spirit that we must believe without proof; have faith without knowing; hope without seeing.

In the past, we on the staff have wracked our brains trying to figure out ways of making the Holy Spirit visible and palatable to the senses so that you might have some experience of it. We have used wind chimes, mobiles, red geraniums, balloons, and a fire pot to try to make the Spirit somehow understandable and visible. But none of them really convey what it means to encounter the Holy Spirit.

Even the biblical writers had a difficult time talking about the Holy Spirit and whenever they did, they had to use metaphors like fire or wind or dove or they described it as power or energy.

So who, other than Pentecostals who fall on the church floor speaking in tongues of ecstatic utterances and twitching uncontrollably, has ever had an experience with the Holy Spirit? And the answer, of course, is—you have! Whether you realize it or not, you are Pentecostal. Pentecostal means having to do with Pentecost or the giving of God’s Spirit to God’s people.

Pentecost reminds us that what we don’t see has more impact upon us than what we do see. We may not realize it but our encounters with the Holy Spirit are on a regular basis. In fact, believe it or not, we actually define the most important aspects of our lives by the invisible Holy Spirit.

To the eyes of many anthropologists, there is no difference between a human being and an animal. Our internal organs, our nervous systems, our digestive systems, our brain functions are all very similar. Not long ago a decomposed body was discovered by the side of an Akron freeway in a plastic bag and an autopsy had to be performed to determine if it was human or animal. It could not be so determined by the visible remains.

And yet, Christians believe that our visible organs or systems or even brain matter does not define human life—human life is determined by what is invisible. There is a Spirit in us that is not found in animals. We alone have the capacity to love, create, forgive, hope, and believe. We alone can make commitments, know justice from injustice, and be moral or immoral. In short, we alone are made in the image of God because into each life God breathed His Holy Spirit. We are who we are because of the invisible Holy Spirit within us.

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When we were immersed into the waters of baptism or had water sprinkled over us when we were an infant, if all there is to our life is the visible, then nothing more happened to us than the fact that we got wet. If we have no experience of the spiritual, then what was the difference between our baptism and a bath or shower? It is the Holy Spirit that makes them different.

When the waters of baptism came over us the Holy Spirit descended upon us and we became more than just a human being, we became a marked person forever—marked by God as His child; and empowered to be a disciple of Jesus Christ.

That Spirit made us clean in a way that visible water could not. It took away the internal dirt of our sins, scrubbed our souls, killed our old rebellious self and raised us into a new life. Nobody saw any of that happen—but it happened. As Jesus said, we must be born of the water and the Spirit or we have not truly found abundant life. It was a defining moment that marked our rebirth—all because of our encounter with the Holy Spirit.

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If you and a loved one stood before others and vowed your love and loyalty in a marriage ceremony, what witnesses saw with their eyes and heard with their ears was two people making crazy promises that neither had any real idea what was meant. On the surface these promises appear no more meaningful than children promising to always behave. But the real power and meaning of what was happening was beyond what the eyes could see and the ears hear.

It was what the Holy Spirit was busy doing—creating the miracle of two separate lives becoming in a central and spiritual way one life. It was plunging a relationship that still lie on the surface into depths of intimacy and commitment you had never yet experienced. You may not realize it, but you define your marriage by what the Holy Spirit did to the two of you. It was the Spirit that brought you together and it is the Spirit that binds you together.

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Whenever we pray, all that is visible and knowable is that we are mumbling some words about what we want in a dark room alone. The words are often wearisome, even to our own ears. And there is no audible answer; no assurance that the words went any further than the walls and ceiling of the room.

But underneath the audible words and scattered thoughts, God’s Spirit is searching our inner thoughts and deepest longings. The Spirit inside of us knows what we need and understands us better than we understand ourselves. As the Apostle Paul said, “We do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” It is the cries of the Holy Spirit within us that reaches the heart of God to plead our case and seek God’s mercy.

And it is through the Holy Spirit that we find strength to fight temptations and forgiveness for our failures. We find comfort for our sorrows; healing for our broken hearts, hope for the unknown future. We define our prayer life and find the power to live through the gift of the Holy Spirit.

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When you think about it the meal that sits upon this communion table is the most ridiculous meal that any people ever ate. This is one meal that will never make it on the food channel. No recipes will help this meal out—a simple cracker and a thimble full of juice. It is a meal that doesn’t even satisfy our hunger.

But there is one ingredient in this meal that is in no other meal—not even a “Happy Meal.” The Holy Spirit is the very presence of the living, resurrected Jesus among us. This tiny meal satisfies our deepest hungers for fellowship, forgiveness, grace, mercy and hope because there is more here than our senses can detect.

In truth, nothing of eternal significance and importance that happens in worship is visible to the eye. All of it is invisible. It is not the words I speak or the songs we sing or the prayers themselves that touch your lives—it is what the Holy Spirit does with them. That’s why you sometimes think I am speaking directly to you, but I’m not—the Holy Spirit is! It is the Holy Spirit each Sunday that changes us from a group of individuals into the body of Jesus Christ.

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When you are not satisfied with watching people suffer, but feel the irresistible urge to give your money and/or your time and effort to do something about it—where does that urging come from? It is the Holy Spirit of justice and compassion moving in you to act on behalf of God’s heart. 

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When you stand at the graveside of a loved one all you see with your eyes is a casket, dirt and a hole in the ground. If there is no Spirit, then that piece of ground has become the final resting place for the person buried there.

But through the power of the Holy Spirit, Christians stand beside that hole in the ground and know that it is a launching pad wherein our loved one will be exploded into eternal life through the power of the Spirit that comes like a mighty wind to reach across the boundaries our bodies cannot enter and raise us up into a spiritual body that will see God face to face.

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So do you see what it really means to be Pentecostal? It’s not about pyrotechnics and bazaar actions, it’s about recognizing and celebrating the very deeds of power God does in our lives that make our lives worth living. Did you realize that you have had so many encounters with the Holy Spirit? We are who we are because there is more to us than meets the eye.

So now how would you answer the question, “Are you Pentecostal?” And does Pentecost seem more worth celebrating now than it did when you first came to worship?

AMEN.