Good news right off the top this morning, once again, O follower of Christ, O friend of God, O beloved of God:  The power of the risen Christ is within you.  The Holy Spirit is within you.  The Holy Spirit is a gift from the God who gives generously.  This is the fulfillment of a promise of God that had been made long ago.

This is our origin story, dear church.  Origin stories are important.  It’s been said that if you don’t know where you came from, you don’t know where you’re going.  Finding out where you come from can be an important factor for people as far as a sense of identity goes – this is why websites like ancestry.com are so popular, no?  This is our identity, dear church.  We heard about our mission last week.  Our business is witness.  We are declarers.  The Holy Spirit is our empowerment.  The Holy Spirit is God’s gift to us as we wait actively. 

I said last week we live in the age of the Spirit.  This picture depicts “God’s Big Story” or meta-narrative.  Creation.  Fall.  Redemption.  Consummation or renewal of all things, or a new heaven and a new earth, when Jesus returns.  We live in the line between redemption and consummation.   We walk the line.  But not alone.  The Holy Spirit is with us.

We are given different images in the Bible to help us in terms of our understanding of and knowing the person of the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit as fire.  Consuming.  Refining. Burning away the part that is unwanted.  Unpredictable.  Wild.  The Holy Spirit as wind.  Again unpredictable.  Powerful.  The rush of a violent wind.  Uncontrollable.  “The wind blows where it chooses,” as Jesus once told a Pharisee who visited him under the cover of darkness.  The Holy Spirit as water, flowing like a river.  “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink.  As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’”  (John 7:37b-38) Now he said this about the Spirit, John tells us.  The Holy Spirit flowing from our hearts like rivers of living water!

The Holy Spirit as a bird.  The Holy Spirit descending like a dove on Jesus at his baptism.  “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” Jesus declared in his hometown synagogue.  The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.  The Spirit of the Lord is upon you.  I love how Paul describes following Christ as being “In Christ”.  The flip side of that phrase is “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”  Christ in me.  Christ in you.  The Holy Spirit of God in you.  The Holy Spirit of Christ in me.   Not because of any goodness or specialness of my own, but because the Holy Spirit is the gift of God.

The Holy Spirit is the fulfillment of the promise of God.  To live in Christ is to live in the promises of God.  Promises of peace.  Promises of accompaniment.  Promises of transformed hearts.  Promises of empowerment for the mission.  This morning in our text, we see the fulfillment of a promise.  “And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.” (Luke 24:49). “You will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.” (1:5)  “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” (1:8)  

This is the promise. Here comes the fulfilment.  “When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.” (2:1)  They were all together in one place.  In these days, when we have become unused to gathering together at particular times and at particular places, how important is it for us as followers of Christ to gather together in one place?  How important is it for us as followers of Christ to leave ourselves open to the power of God working in us and through us?  How important is it for us to share what the Holy Spirit is doing in our lives and in so sharing, learn from one another?  I’m not talking here about or trying to lay a guilt trip on those who are unable to gather due to physical limitations.  What is the importance of the call on our lives to be gathering together in one place, praying and praising and listening to God?

We remember, of course, that they were praying.  They were constantly devoting themselves to prayer.  One of my favourite ways to pray, one of my favourite things to pray for, is to ask God to fulfill God’s promises.  We talked about it last week.  Your Kingdom come, Lord.  Even so, Lord come.  Fill us with your Spirit.  Fill us with all your fullness.  Now one might find this presumptuous, insolent, or maybe even unnecessary. “Of course God’s going to fulfill his promises,” you may say, “You’re always going on about how God is faithful, which means that when God makes a promise, he keeps it, right?  Why would we need to remind God to fulfill his promises?  Wouldn’t that be a little annoying?”  It’s like you know when you’re going to do something, or you’re in the middle of doing something, and someone asks you to do it?  Isn’t that a little annoying?  Maybe it’s just me?  J

Here's the thing, though, about praying for God’s promises.  It renews our confidence.  It reminds us of our need for God, our dependence on God.  Someone has put it like this: 

“In a sense, this is what prayer is – the bold, even arrogant effort on the part of the community to hold God to his promises.  In praying ‘Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,’ we pray that God will be true to himself and give us what has been promised.  Prayer is thus boldness born out of confidence in the faithfulness of God to the promises he makes, confidence that God will be true to himself.  What may appear as prayerful insolence by the church in praying that we shall receive the Spirit, the kingdom, the power, and restoration is in fact the deepest humility, the church’s humble realization that only God can give what the church most desperately needs.”

Only God can give what the church most desperately needs.  May God give us an ever-increasing sense of our need for God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.  Without God, none of this happens.  May we pray in the deepest humility for God to be faithful to God’s promises.  It becomes so freeing.  We’re not doing this on our own.  God is with us always. 

The day of Pentecost had come.  They are together in a particular place and at a particular time.  If we associate the word Pentecost with anything, it might be with the Protestant denomination, which so emphasizes the work of the Holy Spirit and personal experience of the Holy Spirit (some of us have been formed and worshipped in that tradition).   Pentecost was a Jewish festival day that happened 50 days after Passover (the literal meaning of Pentecost is ‘fiftieth day”).  It was a harvest festival that celebrated God’s provision, God’s giving.  It came to also signify God giving the law to Moses at Mount Sinai.

Why is this significant to us?  When we listen for God speaking to us in God’s word, we consider the grand sweep of God’s story from creation to the renewal of all things.  When we consider the giving of the law to the people of Israel at Mount Sinai, we remember the mountain being wreathed in fire and swept by wind.  We remember the promise given through the prophet Jeremiah -  “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” (Jer 31:33)  The Holy Spirit as God’s refining fire within us.  The Holy Spirit as the enabler of the fruit of the Spirit in us – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, self-control.

A sound came like the rush of a violent wind.  At creation, a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.  Again, we consider this story in the grand sweep of God’s story.  Something new is being created here.  The new thing that is being created is the church.  This is a pivotal moment!  Divided tongues as of fire appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.  All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

Each one of them had an individual experience of the Holy Spirit, as a tongue rested on each of them.  There’s no description of what that was like for Peter or James or John or Mary, or any other of the 120 that were gathered.  Luke’s emphasis here is on their collective experience.  The description we have is that all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit. 

In order for what?  In order that doors and walls may be dissolved (metaphorically, at least).  In order that the church might be empowered to go public with the message of the good news of Christ.  The thing about Pentecost or the Feast of Weeks is that it was a pilgrimage feast where Jewish people from all over would come to Jerusalem.  From as far east as Persia, west to Rome, down to North Africa, Arabia, Crete, the list goes on.  Look at what the crowd says about what they’re hearing these followers of Jesus say in their own languages – “… in our own languages, we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.”

The church is given the ability to make God’s deeds of power known.  The miracle is in the speaking rather than the hearing.  The story might have gone that one of the apostles went out to preach to the crowds in Greek or Aramaic, and that miraculously everyone from all these different places understood.  “How is it that we hear each of us in our own native language… in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power?”

What does this mean? We’ve been talking about the loving-kindness of God.  We’ve been talking about God’s generosity.  Think what it meant to those people gathered from so many nations to hear the good news of God’s deeds of power in their own language.  Think about what our mother tongue means to us; how it evokes mothers, safety, security, and home.  Think about the number of people in our city who are trying to make their way in a language other than the one they learned from their parents (and maybe forgetting that language).  Think of what it might mean to be in a foreign city and hear someone speaking your language.  A Filipino friend told the story of being out and hearing a woman speaking Tagalog.  This woman was on the phone with family back home.  Homesick.  On the verge of tears.  My friend started talking to her when her phone call finished.  They became friends. 

The kingdom of God is for everyone, and it crosses national/ethnic/cultural/language lines. (Religious lines too, but we’ll get to that later in Acts.  All the followers of Christ are Jewish here.)  The kingdom of God crosses these lines and unites followers of Christ in a whole new way, but it does erase or efface them.  The kingdom of God is not “Everyone should assimilate,” or “We speak English here,” or “We worship this way,” or any of the number of ways in which in-groups set themselves up as superior.  Differences are not erased in the kingdom of God (we recognize and celebrate them), but their significance becomes secondary to the truth that we are united by something that goes beyond history or culture or language.

We are made one in the Holy Spirit of God.  I’ve had the chance to go to ordination services in some of our sister Chinese churches here in the GTA.  One of the things I love is singing the congregation singing “The Doxology” in Mandarin, Cantonese and English.  Wonderful!

In the power of the Spirit, our role is to make God’s unifying, forgiving, restoring deeds of power known in our words and in our actions.  This is our part to play as the Holy Spirit gives us power.  There are things beyond our control, like how people will react.  Some will sneer, and that’s ok.  They’re drunk. They’re deluded.  They’re…  Others will say, “What does this mean?”

There are people all around us who are homesick – literally sick, longing for a home, even if they’ve lived here all their lives.  So we’ll keep on living and telling the story. This is the church’s origin story.  A group of people empowered by the Holy Spirit to forge connections by inviting others into communities that celebrate and demonstrate the mighty acts of God, made known in the salvation of Christ Jesus, and that are being transformed (made more like Jesus) by the power of the Holy Spirit, Christ in us, the hope of glory.  Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift!