This Week at the Center for Excellence in Preaching

For additional Pentecost text resources on other texts, paste these links into your browser:

Sermon Starter Ideas from the “This Week in Preaching” Archive on Acts 2:1-11

http://cep.calvinseminary.edu/thisWeek/viewArticle.php?aID=94

Sermon Starter Ideas from the “This Week in Preaching” Archive on John 14:8-17:

http://cep.calvinseminary.edu/thisWeek/viewArticle.php?aID=152

In the 2008 cycle of the Year A Lectionary and church year calendar, Pentecost falls on Mother’s Day in the U.S. and it may be a toss-up as to who will get the most attention in many churches: the Holy Spirit or the moms.  I suppose combination sermons are possible but I won’t be posting any such creative ideas here!   We’ll go with the Spirit, with all due respect and gratitude to our dear mothers, of course.

The Year A main gospel text for Pentecost is John 20:19-23, which some commentators have described as a Pre-Pentecost event (or a kind of proto-Pentecost or perhaps a mini-Pentecost).    Textually it may be difficult to square this post-Easter giving out of the Holy Spirit with the grander Pentecost account that we receive in Acts 2.  If Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit onto the disciples in that locked room right after he rose again from the dead, then just what in addition to that did they receive on Pentecost proper some 50 days later?  Is there a distinction between this reception of the Spirit and the coming of the Spirit “in power” that took place in Jerusalem later on?

It would likely be dangerous to try to parse this theologically.  This is the kind of thing that leads to theological propositions that suggest a spiritual stratification that is almost certainly unwarranted.    Some could claim a kind of spiritual one-upmanship by saying, “Well, more charismatic Christians who speak in tongues have the full power of the Spirit such as we see in Acts 2 but some don’t yet have such an advanced dose of the Spirit and so may be stuck with the little bit of the Spirit that Jesus doled on in John 20.”

Whatever we make of the mini-Pentecost of John 20, we should not create spiritual categories that the New Testament itself does not validate.   John wanted to make clear the tight connection between the resurrection and the reception of new life in the Spirit.   For his theology, fifty days would have been too long to wait to introduce the giving of the Spirit, and so John depicts Jesus as breathing out the Spirit in the immediate aftermath—and as a direct consequence of—the great Easter event.  If anything, John’s presentation definitely cuts against any attempts to stratify Christians that try to suggest that there are varying baptisms in the Holy Spirit and varying degrees to which Christians possess the Spirit.  No, John tells us that when you are baptized into the resurrection life of Christ, you get the Spirit immediately and from no less than Jesus himself.

John 20:22 lacks the eye-popping spectacle of Acts 2 and the great wind and the tongues of flame dividing over the apostles.  But what John 20’s account lacks in terms of spectacle, it more than compensates for in terms of intimacy.   When Scripture began in Genesis, we are told that God breathed the breath of life directly into the nostrils of the first human beings.   It’s a CPR-like image that brings lips into contact with flesh.  It is, after its own fashion, a kiss.   John 20 does not tell us that Jesus made physical contact with the disciples in that room that night but the image of him breathing onto the disciples is nevertheless (and literally) warm.  And there can be no mistaking the theme of New Creation.   As the Creator God breathed life into the first Adam in the Garden at the dawn of time, now the Word of God (who created all things in the beginning, harking back to John 1) does the same once more in a re-creation of life.

What can be more moving to us as Christians than the picture of our great God in Christ touching us lip to lip, face to face, and breathing on us the warm breath of the new life we now possess forever and ever by the grace of God’s resurrection power in Jesus?  

But let’s not forget the original context of where this happened.  Part of the joy of preaching on John 20 on Pentecost will be to remind the congregation of the atmosphere that pervaded that room just before Jesus showed up to give the Spirit.   We are told that on the evening of Easter Sunday, the disciples were in a locked room—the door was locked out of fear.   The text claims they were afraid of the Jews, but since there is no evidence that anyone was trying to hunt down Jesus’ followers now that their Master was out of the way, it’s an open question of what they were really afraid of.  They had already been told that Jesus was alive and so, as Craig Barnes once wondered, could it be that they were a little afraid of running into Jesus himself?  To a person they had all failed Jesus, after all.

But whatever the precise reason for the locked door, fear was behind it.  And it is into precisely that atmosphere of fear and uncertainty that Jesus not only appears from out of nowhere but brings with him the message of peace and the great gift of the Holy Spirit.

Perhaps Pentecost is a Sunday to remember that this is always how God in Christ comes to us: he meets us in our fear and uncertainty, in all those places where we go to be behind a locked door so as to escape from and hide from our shame, our anxiety, our depression, our guilt.  He comes to us as a divine lover and tenderly presses his lips to our lips so as to breathe into us yet again the life-giving, shame-erasing, guilt-removing Spirit of the one true God.   It’s a greater gift than we realize a good bit of the time.  But without it, we’d surely suffocate under the weight of our sin and despair.

Thanks be to God for his abiding Pentecostal presence with us, his frail but humbly grateful people!

When new life comes by the Holy Spirit, isn’t it curious to note that forgiveness is the first item on the agenda?  In John 20, no sooner does Jesus breathe the Spirit onto his followers and he immediately mentions the forgiveness of sins, particularly the disciples’ forgiveness of other people.  Apparently there is a tight connection between new life in the resurrected Christ and the act of forgiveness.

On the surface of it, Jesus seems to be giving the disciples both a blank check and a whole lot of clout and power.  Are the disciples now going to wield this Spirit-driven ability to forgive (or not) in a willy-nilly, arbitrary way?   John 20 provides no guidelines or instructions but we can assume that the intention here is not for the disciples to start walking around a city like Jerusalem and randomly pointing at one person after the next and saying, “Forgiven.  Unforgiven.  Forgiven.  Forgiven.  Nope, not you, pal!   Forgiven.  Unforgiven . . .”

So how should we read Jesus’ semi-startling words that the disciples had this ability to forgive—or not—in ways that are so binding?  It is certainly not a power to be wielded lightly.  It’s also something with a clear connection to the presence of the Holy Spirit in our hearts, and maybe that fact right there tells us something. 

After all, consider the setting: the disciples had just recently failed Jesus miserably.  They were disloyal, dishonest, fearful, and feckless.  Small wonder that upon hearing that Jesus might be back that they locked the door.  Maybe they convinced themselves that it was the Jewish authorities they were afraid of.  But since they didn’t appear to huddle in locked rooms the day before they were told Jesus had come back to life, you wonder why they locked the door only after hearing Mary Magdalene’s testimony of his return.

In any event, it was an act of supreme grace that Jesus came among them, flashed a kind smile at them as he spoke “Peace” to them and then gave them the truly great gift of nothing less than a share of the divine through the anointing of the Holy Spirit.  In a setting like that, hearing “If you forgive anyone his sins . . .” implicitly carried with it the idea “Oh and by the way, don’t forget all the sins I just forgave in all of you simply by virtue of showing up here brimming with grace!”   Those who know they have been forgiven much—and who know that deep in their bones—ought not turn around and behave ungraciously themselves.

Yes, there would be people in the future lives of the disciples (as well as in the church those disciples-cum-apostles would found) who would be unforgiven for one reason or another (and the main reason would generally be that they did not want anyone’s forgiveness in the first place).   But considering what Jesus did for his disciples that very evening inside that locked room—inside that room that was so filled with shame and guilt--Jesus’ subsequent mention of forgiveness was not only a sign of the Spirit’s presence and power in their hearts but set the tone for the forgiveness they were then encouraged to dole out to others whose sins were as real and as raw as the sins of the disciples had just been. 

When you just have had the weight of the world removed from your shoulders through another person’s graciousness toward you, it’s not the moment to start calculating what other people in life you want to see stay similarly burdened and what ones you might be willing to help out.   Instead, the joy you feel at having been forgiven becomes contagious—you can’t wait to start spreading it around! 

Pentecost is about receiving a cosmically grand gift of forgiveness by God.  Indeed, remembering the Old Testament tradition of the Tabernacle and Temple, we realize that God cannot dwell inside an unholy place or people.  So the only way the Holy Spirit can move into our hearts is if we are first cleansed thoroughly by the grace of Jesus.  “Be holy as I am holy, says the Lord your God.”   That wasn’t just some long dead slogan from the Book of Leviticus—it is a truth that goes to the core of how God and humanity can live together.   But since humanity cannot achieve holiness from its side of things, God made it possible from his side of things through the sacrifice of the only Son.  And the proof that that sacrifice “took,” that it achieved the aim of making a holy people, is the fact that the Holy Spirit can now move into the neighborhood and take up  residence in our hearts as followers of Christ.

When we realize all that had to happen by the galactic grace of God to make the truth of Pentecost possible, then when we hear Jesus telling us that forgiving the sins of others is Item #1 on our daily “To Do” list as Christians, we will know for certain that we are to be lavish with this forgiveness even as our great God in Christ was lavish in forgiving us so thoroughly as to bring the Spirit right into our very hearts!

Before breathing the Holy Spirit on the disciples, Jesus first showed them his scars.  Doing so provided more than just some jolt of recognition on the part of the disciples.  This was not only a sign of the continuity between Jesus’ pre-crucifixion body and his post-crucifixion body.  Instead, perhaps we can see in those scars the very earthy nature of the ministry for which the Holy Spirit ultimately equips us.  The scars remind us of what even the Son of God had to do so as to make us a holy enough people as to warrant the presence of God’s own Spirit in us.  But maybe those same scars remind us that we are called to minister in a rough and tumble world of sin that does that kind of thing to even the divine One in our midst.  The Spirit did not come to us from an ecstatic vision of light and glory.  The Spirit did not come to us on a silver platter and hand delivered to us by a celestial angel of light.  The Spirit came to us from One whose body had been broken and still showed the signs of this.  And that Spirit comes to us and calls us to a sacrificial ministry in a world full of brokenness and a world willing to keep on breaking all that is holy.

C.S. Lewis was obviously taken with John 20’s presentation of Jesus’ breathing the Holy Spirit onto his disciples because he wove just that image into the final scene of his first Narnia chronicle, “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.”   Those of us who recently saw the new movie based on this book remember when Aslan, after returning from the dead, goes around and breathes on all the creatures that had been turned to stone by the White Witch, bringing them back to life.  It’s a moving image but those of us who have focused more on the film of late may forget the lyric description of this act of new creation that Lewis wrote in the book.  So here is the passage from page165 of the Colliers paperback edition of “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” (Colliers, New York, 1970):

“I expect you’ve seen someone put a lighted match to a bit of newspaper which is propped up in a grate against an unlit fire.  And for a second nothing seems to have happened, and then you notice a tiny streak of flame creeping along the edge of the newspaper.  It was like that now.  For a second after Aslan had breathed upon him, the stone lion looked just the same.  Then a tiny streak of gold began to run along his white marble back—then it spread—then the colour seemed to lick all over him as the flame licks all over a bit of paper—then, while his hind-quarters were still obviously stone, the lion shook his mane and all the heavy, stony folds rippled into living hair.  Then he opened a great red mouth, warm and living, and gave a prodigious yawn.  And now his hind legs had come to life.  He lifted one of them and scratched himself.  Then, having caught sight of Aslan, he went bounding after him and frisking round him whimpering with delight and jumping up to lick his face.”

It’s a text that really does put one in mind to anticipate those great words: “Behold, I make all things new.”