This morning we have two very important things going on as a part of our worship service. The most obvious is that today is Confirmation Sunday. For the last two years, Jake, Samantha, Ethan, Elizabeth, Emily, Miranda, and Lexie have gone through careful instruction with me in the basics of the Christian Faith. We’ve used the doctrine of the Scriptures as taught in Luther’s Small Catechism as the basis for our instruction. During that time, you have had to search the Scriptures, and learned about the faith that you will confess as your own today. It’s a big day! In some cases, you have friends and relatives that have traveled a long ways to be here for this service today. But, as you have heard me say several times, today is not graduation from church.
While Confirmation Sunday is a big day in the life of the Lutheran congregation, that’s not the only big event we remember today. Today is also the Day of Pentecost. It’s the day we sometimes call the “Birthday of the Christian Church.” In our reading from Acts 2 and the Gospel reading from John 15 and 16, we hear about the promise of the coming of the Holy Spirit, and the fulfillment of it in Acts. This morning, we’re going to look at that first Pentecost, and discover why it’s such a big deal to us today, and why that event can give our confirmands a lot of confidence as they go out living their lives in the Christian faith today.
Pentecost seems to be one of the days of the church year that a lot of Lutherans don’t seem to know what to do with. We know it’s one of the few times in the church year that the liturgical color is red, and that it has something to do with the Holy Spirit, tongues of fire, and strange languages, but beyond that, we don’t really seem to know what to do with it. Not only that, but we also have those who look at us and say that we don’t talk enough about the Holy Spirit, that what we believe, teach, and confess is dead, that we’re not “alive” like other churches seem to be. It’s a day that can bring about what I call “Lutheran shame”, and we decide it’s easier to just not talk about Pentecost, or what happened on that day. Well this morning, we are going to talk about Pentecost, and we’re going to talk about the Holy Spirit, but we’re going to see how the Holy Spirit truly works, and what it has to do with our confirmands, and with us.
Well, to start off with, let’s discover what the Holy Spirit’s work is. It has been 10 days since Jesus had ascended into heaven. Just prior to His ascension into heaven, Jesus told his disciples to stay in Jerusalem and wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit, who would empower them to be Jesus’ witnesses in Jerusalem, all of Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth. They spent that time together, devoting themselves to prayer and meditating on the Word that Jesus had given them.
Then it happens. A sound of a rushing wind filled the room where the Disciples were. Now that’s a pretty extraordinary event! But there’s more. Next, tounges of fire descend over the disciples heads. Now that’s pretty impressive, needless to say, it’s going to grab a LOT of attention.
This is all taking place at the Jewish Pentecost festival, which was one of the major festivals Jewish men were expected to return to Jerusalem for. So you have devout Jews from every tribe and place in the city. Historical records apart from the Scriptures tell us that at such times, the population of Jerusalem would swell to several hundred thousand, sometimes perhaps over a million. What’s important to note is that these men are devout Jews. These are people who have been well educated in the Word of God. They know everything there is to know about the coming Messiah, except for one thing: His name.
This sets the stage for what happens next. The apostles come out, and start speaking in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. In other words, the disciples come out, and they start speaking other known languages. Languages that they had never spoken before. Now any of you who have ever tried to learn a foreign language will know that it takes YEARS before you can really master another language, let alone the different dialects that there are. My brother spent a semester studying at Oxford University in England as part of his business degree program at Waldorf College, and he told me upon his return that it was extremely difficult to understand the people in Oxford, England, because they had a British accent, and also had different words for different things than what we would use in rural Iowa. Yet here, the Disciples come out, and they’re speaking in foreign languages they had never spoken before, and so well, that the Jews who where there were saying “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us in his own native language?” It’s obvious something big is going on! They’re telling the good news about Jesus to all of these people in the language that they can understand! This isn’t the kind of “speaking in tongues” that you’ll sometimes hear folks of a Charismatic or Pentecostal background talk about. Here you have Scriptural evidence that “tongues” refers to speaking in known languages that hearers can understand.
In the midst of all of this, Peter gets up and starts preaching a sermon. He tells them that what is going on is the fulfillment of a prophecy in Joel, and points them to Jesus, the one that they had put to death, was the long awaited Messiah. Later in the chapter, we’re told that Peter’s audience is cut to the heart by the preaching of the law, and ask what they are to do. Peter tells them to repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of their sins, and that this gift was for them, and their children, and for all who were far off, everyone whom the Lord would call to himself. And then, we’re told that 3,000 people were baptized and added to the church that day, and that they continued to gather around the apostles’ teaching, and the breaking of the bread, in other words, they gathered around the preaching of the Word and the Sacrament of Holy Communion on a regular basis. And that the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved!
Talk about quite a day. You can just read into the text a lot of fervor and zeal in those early Christians. That had to have been an exciting day to be a part of! After all, 3000 people heard the Gospel preached to them in their own language, believed, and were baptized. To give you a point of comparison, if we averaged 30 baptisms a year in the 100 years that Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church has been around, we’d finally get to 3,000. And this all happened on Pentecost in one day! When we compare that, life at Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church seems to be pretty dull compared to that, although we’ve had quite an exciting weekend here with a wedding yesterday and confirmation today. Because of that, we’re led to despair sometimes, and wonder if we have the Holy Spirit like other churches do. So, do we have the Spirit at Our Saviour’s? Are we allowing the Holy Spirit to work?
Well to find the answer, let me ask you a couple of questions. What are we missing from that day of Pentecost? Well, we didn’t have a loud rushing wind fill the building this morning. And, as I look out at the congregation, I don’t see any tongues of fire dancing atop anyone’s heads, and I doubt you’ll see that when our confirmands publically confess their faith in the Rite of Confirmation. What do we have? The furniture you see in the front of this church will give you that answer. You see the pulpit and lectern, where the Word of God is read from and proclaimed to you, telling you that we have the Apostles’ teaching, the Word of God, that is read and proclaimed. You see the Baptismal Font, telling us the same baptism that was given to those 3,000 people that day is given here. And, you see the altar, where we receive the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, where we receive the body and blood of our Lord.
Now if you ask me, we have what’s necessary to forgive sins and give eternal life, we have Word and Sacrament. You see, when something big happened in God’s plan of salvation in the Bible, He kicked it off with something special: at the crucifixion, darkness covered the land, the temple curtain was torn in two, and the earth shook. At the Resurrection, the stone was rolled away. Here at Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit that Jesus had promised the disciples would come in the Gospel reading arrived, its announced with the rushing wind, tongues of fire, and the gift of languages. Those things didn’t give forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. God’s Word, Holy Baptism, and Holy Communion do. Those are the means that the Holy Spirit worked through to bring people to faith, and to strengthen the faith of those who already believed.
So could it be? Could it be that what we’ve been doing as Lutherans who believe the Old and New Testaments are the inspired, infallible Word of God, and that the Word, attached to water in Holy Baptism and bread and wine in Holy Communion, without all the gimmicks and fads attached to them, is exactly what those early Christians in Acts 2 were doing? Could it be that the problem isn’t with the Scriptures, or the doctrine that these young people have come to learn in Luther’s Small Catechism, but that the problem is with us, in wanting to squelch the Spirit’s work by our own emotions, ideas, or activity, looking for the Spirit in places He has not promised to be found?
But wait, some of you might say, 3,000 people were baptized after one sermon, without having to spend two years of careful instruction with the Pastor studying the doctrine of the Scriptures! Something powerful had to be going on! Well, let’s put that into proper perspective. Pentecost was a major Jewish festival that would bring many Jewish men into Jerusalem. Historical record apart from the Scriptures tell us that Jerusalem’s population would swell to up to one million or more during such times. Not only that, but the text tells us these were devout Jews, men who were well schooled in the Word of God, they knew everything there was about the Messiah expect one thing, his name. Now, if you do the math, if we have 1 million devout Jews in the city at Pentecost, and 3,000 of them hear the message proclaimed to them in their own language, and they are baptized, then that means 3 one-thousandths of one percent of the Jews in Jerusalem heard the message, believed, and were baptized. If you were to talk to a supposed church growth expert today with a statistic like that, they’d call the Pentecost event a failure.
For you confirmands, today it is going to be easy to promise that you will remain faithful in the Christian faith. But, the tough part happens the moment you walk out of that door. Statistically speaking, half of you will eventually stop coming to church in your high school years. You’ll find the allure of sports, late Saturday nights with friends, or other things in the world to be more important than being strengthened in your faith in church where Christ is present with His gifts of Word and Sacrament. You’ll be tempted with this sin and that sin, and have the world tell you that what you learned in the Bible isn’t really relevant anymore. Go ahead, do what you want, God doesn’t care. You’ll be tempted to look for God in places He hasn’t promised to be found. You’ll be tempted to turn your back on Word and Sacrament because they’re not flashy, or entertaining in the eyes of the world. But, there’s a great danger in that! When you ignore these means that the Holy Spirit promises to work through, you are setting yourself up for the devil, the world, and your sinful flesh to tell you that you don’t need that forgiveness stuff. And eventually, you will have starved out your faith, resisted the work of the Spirit, and given up the gifts of forgiveness, life, and salvation for the chains of sin, death, and the power of the devil. Don’t do that! Stay in the Word!
But that plea isn’t just for our confirmands, it’s also for all of us at Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church. Don’t go looking for the Spirit in places He has not promised to be. Sometimes, we’re tempted to fall into this thing I call “Lutheran Shame”, in that we’re led to believe that our doctrine and practice isn’t all that exciting, and so we go and look at other churches, and see what they’re doing that seems more alive, and want to adopt their methods without first going to the Word of God to find out if they are scriptural or not. We’re often tempted to believe that the Spirit won’t work through these means, like He did in the early church and try to come up with our own methods to cause the Holy Spirit to want to come and work. When that happens, we forget that the Holy Spirit works through means, that He has promised to work faith through the Word and the Sacrament when and where He wills. There are times and places where mission work is slow, and other times and places where it is fertile. Paul sometimes would preach, and have several converts, while other places, he would nearly be stoned to death. The history of our congregation even tells us such is true. It took 26 years from the time Pastor Kristian Anker of Elk Horn first started coming to do mission work amongst Danish Lutherans in Audubon to the time a congregation was formally established and a resident pastor was called. 26 years of sporadic services, and pastors coming from out of town to establish a congregation here. Some would have given up, but those early Pastors and Christians in this area knew that the Holy Spirit works through the means of Word and Sacrament, and in God’s timing, a congregation was planted from those seeds that were planted during that time. Don’t get caught up in a statistical report, or a dollar sign to measure a church’s mission. We’re called to measure it by if that church or mission is proclaiming the Word of God in its truth and purity, and if the Sacraments are being administered to the Word of Chirst, and let us repent when we use any other means to try to bring about the work of the Holy Spirit.
During pictures this morning, to try to get the kids to smile, one of the parents told the kids to say “No more Wednesday afternoons with Pastor Martin.” While your confirmation instruction ends, as I have told you, your life of hearing the Scriptures preached to you is only just beginning. I want to encourage you to continue to allow the Spirit to point you to Christ through the Word and through the Sacraments. Continue to come here on Sunday mornings, be fed through God’s Word and Sacraments, where the Spirit will convict you of your sins, and point you to Christ crucified, who through His life, death, and resurrection, has won forgiveness, eternal life, and salvation for you. Continue to read your Bibles at home, come to High School Sunday School this fall, I know Lee Nielsen would LOVE having you there and he’s got a lot of great things to teach you from the Scriptures. Don’t be afraid to come by my office and ask me the tough questions. We’ll sit down together, and find the answers in the Word of God.
And for the rest of us, the Day of Pentecost is a challenge for us to remain faithful to the doctrine we have learned from the Scriptures. Be encouraged in that being a church that remains faithful to Word and Sacrament ministry, is being an Acts 2 type of church. Be encouraged in the knowledge that the Holy Spirit is at work here. Even though the means may not be that flashy, we have the promise from God’s Holy Word that the Spirit is here, through the Word, through Holy Baptism, through Holy Communion to convict us of our sin, and to point us to our Savior, Jesus Christ, and to either bring us to faith in Christ, or strengthen our faith in Christ. What could be more exciting than that? May God grant that to us for Jesus’ sake. Amen.
