RCL Year B Pentecost
Acts 2:1–21, Psalm 104:25–35 and 37, Romans 8:22–27, Saint John 15:26–27 and 16:4b–15
You heard in the First Lesson about tongues of fire coming down from heaven and lighting upon the heads of the disciples. It sounds fantastic. It seems very dramatic. But God is fantastic and dramatic. You have only to remember the Resurrection to recall exactly how fantastic and dramatic God can be.
The tongues of fire may leave Episcopalians cold, but I pray they do not leave you cold. You may not see this ever happening to you. You may not want it to happen to you. But if you look deeper, if you consider the tongues as a way God selected to make himself known to his people, as a way with outward and visible signs of giving them the grace and the power to be his people in the world, then the coldness may melt. The hardness may soften. You will have had a very wonderful Day of Pentecost if you can just see a little more clearly that God wishes to make himself known to you. God wants to lead your life. God wants to give you what you need to go on.
But God’s grace doesn’t stop there. God takes the first step to make himself known to you so that you can share that relationship with other people. That’s evangelism. And, that’s part of our mission at Good Shepherd.
You really can’t do better than to remember Christ’s words from the Gospel: “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.”[1] I genuinely believe that, and I ask myself several times a day, “What is God trying to get through to me? What am I missing in my understanding and functioning?” For the very last thing that I want to do is to compromise the truth and the power of God’s revelation to us. And so I recommend that together we trust that what God has made known to us, he intends us to use to guide us into all the truth, that in our worship we come closer to his near presence. And Saint Paul tells us in the Epistle that “the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.”[2] The Spirit intercedes for you and for me, that together we find our way home, and do his will along the way.
[1] Saint John 16:13a.
[2] Romans 8:27.
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