On What Happens Next
May 30, 2004 (The Day of Pentecost [Whitsunday])
By
The Rev. Benjamin J. Newland
- Acts 2:1-11
- Psalm 104:25-37
- 1 Corinthians 12:4-13
- John 20:19-23
Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.
Pentecost is about two things: the coming of the Holy Spirit, and what happens next. But before I can enlighten you on these two important aspects of the Feast of Pentecost, I need to backtrack about ten days, to the Feast of the Ascension. A week ago last Thursday, we celebrated a special Eucharist here in honor of Jesus’ ascending into Heaven. Most of you were not there, which is why I have to go back and explain this before we can get on to Pentecost. Not that I blame you for not being there. Thursday is a very inconvenient day for Jesus to have ascended, but at this point there isn’t much I can do about that.
Anyways, about forty days after he rose from the dead, Jesus rose from the earth, leaving behind his disciples who were now convinced of his miraculous resurrection. The central issue of Ascension is the principal weakness of religion in general, and the Christian religion in particular, at least from the atheist’s point of view. “So you say there is a God? Well, where is he?” It’s even worse for Christianity: “So you say God was a human being? Well, where did he go? And why doesn’t he come back?” The central problem of Ascension is that Jesus is no longer here.
Of course, if you have been properly indoctrinated into this religion of ours you should immediately reply that Jesus IS still here. This is true. Jesus is here in the leading of our hearts, in the example he set that we seek to follow, and in the profoundly human acts of sacrifice, kindness, and love that, if we are lucky, we experience in those around us. However, while it may be true that Jesus is still here, it is also true that Jesus is not here. The walking, talking, eating, drinking, sweating, breathing human being named Jesus of Nazareth who for thirty-odd years was also God incarnate is no longer available to us. He is dead. Or rather, he isn’t dead, but has ascended into Heaven and sitteth upon the right hand of God the Father. Amen.
This is where the disciples were when they were sitting around the house with the doors locked for fear of the Jews. Ten days ago they still had Jesus around to guide them. Granted, his appearances had been sporadic and ghostly since Easter, but he was still there. For a long time these disciples had had Jesus his own self around to help them out with the building of this Kingdom of God, and now he was gone. Ascended into heaven. Perhaps all of this seems a bit dramatic to us. We’ve never had Jesus around in the flesh in the first place, as all of this happened so long ago. But for the disciples... well, the whole thing most likely left them shocked and awed.
So, having set the scene for you by recapping the Ascension, we can now move on to Pentecost. Again, Pentecost is about two things: the coming of the Holy Spirit, and what happens next. The story of the arrival of the Holy Spirit is well known to most of us. The Disciples are gathered together in Jerusalem when a violent wind rushes through the house they’re sitting in. Tongues of fire appear dancing on their heads, and they are filled with the Holy Spirit. The Disciples run outside and immediately begin talking about God in many different languages, so that all the diverse people there could hear and understand.
The story is well known, but hopefully with the background of the Ascension in mind you can see more of the need for it. This wasn’t just a neat trick God performed like some miraculous interpreter of many languages. This was the return of God, after God had left. Jesus had ascended into heaven, leaving his beloved disciples behind, but promising that he would again be with them through his sending of his Holy Spirit. Pentecost is the fulfillment of Jesus’ life, death, and ministry on Earth.
Now, for the best part. Jesus ascended into heaven and the Holy Spirit came down, but my favorite part is what happens next. Because what happens next is where we are right now. What happens next is precisely all of Christian history: some good, some bad, some horrific, and some sublime. What happens next is everything, including all of the things that you and I have done, are doing, and will do in our turn at life here on this third island out from the Sun. A bit overwhelming I suppose, and I’ve put it rather dramatically, but it is true nonetheless. The Season after Pentecost is our season. We’ve completed the remembering of our church year cycle of the life of Jesus and come to the place where we’ve been for the last few hundred years. We know the story of Jesus, we have been given the Holy Spirit, and now here we are, intimately involved in, and responsible for, what comes next.
I’ll leave you with a few thoughts on the last line of today’s Gospel reading, with which I began this sermon. “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” These are some of Jesus’ parting words to the Disciples according to the Gospel of John. It sounds like Jesus is giving them, in addition to the Holy Spirit, an unlimited license to judge any they come across, either forgiving or retaining sins as they see fit, By extrapolation, as we are the heirs of those disciples, such a power to judge must be ours.
I’d like to suggest that what Jesus is giving them is not permission to judge, but a command to draw others to God. In the Gospel of John, sin is not a particular moral failing, or an act of indiscretion, or even an intentionally evil deed. Sin is simply anything that leave us blind to God’s revelation in Jesus. So when Jesus tells the disciples that they are in charge of forgiving and retaining sin, he’s telling them that if they don’t do something, people are going to keep on being blind to God. If they don’t say something, it won’t get said. The disciples work then, and our work now, is not to run around deciding which sinful acts we are going to persecute and which we’ll ignore. Our work is to forgive in others their separation from God, and to seek to draw them closer to God. Should we fail in that, those we meet and we ourselves will retain our separation from God, and we will leave this season after Pentecost no better than we came to it.
Today we mark the coming of the Holy Spirit, but one way or another I imagine you have all received the Holy Spirit before. Live then, in this season after Pentecost, in this time and place where we have received the Holy Spirit. We are in God’s time of what happens next. Live here as God has charged you to do, for this is our season, our time, our Spirit. Amen.