Join us in person at 9:45am at Olivet Presbyterian Church in West Elizabeth or at 11:15am at Bethesda United Presbyterian Church in Elizabeth OR on Facebook Live any time beginning at 11:15am Sunday, May 28.
Worship
Service for May 28, 2023
Prelude
Announcements:
Call to Worship
L: Spirit of the living God, visit us again
on this day of Pentecost.
P: Come, Holy Spirit.
L: With rushing wind that sweeps away all
barriers,
P: Come, Holy Spirit.
L: With tongues of fire that set our hearts
aflame,
P: Come, Holy Spirit.
L: With speech that unites the Babel of our
tongues,
P: Come, Holy Spirit.
L: With love that overlaps the boundaries of
race and nation,
P: Come, Holy Spirit.
L: With power from above to make our weakness
strong,
P: Come, Holy Spirit.
Opening Hymn – Spirit of God, Descend Upon My Heart
Hymn #326/390
Prayer of Confession
Lord of patience and
persistence, we live in a broken and shattered world. All around us we see great evidence of hatred
and alienation. We cannot help but
observe the alienation of Your people from each other. We create devices to separate rather than
unite; to divide rather than come together in hope. Forgive us our sins. These sins cause such division and hurt. Remind us today that the disciples, too,
lived in a fearful world and that one day You came to them, as they sat huddled
in fear, and You empowered them. You
gave them hearts of courage and faith.
Please bring us the same hearts that we may serve You well, bring peace
and hope to our world. In the name of
Christ, we offer this prayer. (Silent
prayers are offered)
AMEN.
Assurance of Pardon
L: Friends, fear no more! The power of God’s Holy Spirit has set us
free from the prison of doubt and fear!
P: Now is the time to shine with the light of
God’s love given to us by Jesus Christ.
Thanks be to God! AMEN.
Gloria Patri
Affirmation of Faith/Apostles’
Creed
I believe in God the Father
Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth; And in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord;
who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under
Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; He descended into hell; the
third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on
the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence He shall come to judge
the quick and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Ghost,
the holy catholic Church; the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins; the
resurrection of the body; and the life everlasting. AMEN
Pastoral Prayer and Lord’s
Prayer
Come, Holy Spirit: blow among us and stir us with your
power. Inspire our speech, that we may
proclaim the good news of Christ with our words and our deeds. Come, Holy Spirit: breathe upon us, deepen
our faith and fill us with your wisdom.
Draw us into communion with you and community with one another. Come, Holy Spirit, breathe your healing power
upon those in need. Give health and
strength to those who are sick, courage to those who suffer, and hope to those
who mourn. We especially pray for….
Pour upon us your spirit of compassion, that we may become
instruments of your healing and peace.
Ignite us with your love, and make us bold in sharing your gifts of
forgiveness and mercy. Where lives are
parched, send the waters of life. Where
sins abound, wash these away. Where
spirits are worn and wounded, be a healing presence. Where hopelessness abounds ignite the fire of
your love within our hearts. Where our
ancient enemy binds us in apathy, loosen the reigns.
And now, great God of Light and Life, hear the groanings of
our own spirits as they speak to your Spirit, may they communicate the desires
of our hearts and the power of your love.
Bring us to new life, we pray, O God, and may your Holy
Spirit ever flow through us – we pray all this in your Son’s Holy Name with the
prayer Your Son taught us…Our
Father who art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy name.
Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our
debtors. And lead us not into
temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. AMEN.
Hymn – Spirit Hymn
#319
Blue
Hymnal
Scripture Reading(s):
Psalm
104:24-35
Acts
2:1-21
Sermon
–
The Pentecostal Holy Spirit
(based
on Acts:2:1-21)
Last
week I mentioned that Ascension Sunday was one of the four most important
Christian holidays in the Church year and that we don’t really celebrate it
enough. Today, is another one –
Pentecost Sunday. We all know that Pentecost
is important—after all, living a Christian life would be impossible without the
coming of the Holy Spirit when the new Christian Church was born out of the
Hebrew faith. That said, Pentecost
barely causes a ripple in many churches today, even though many of us remembered
to wear red – but that’s pretty much the extent of our Pentecost celebrations. Unlike the season of Lent that leads up to
Easter, there are no weeks of preparation. And there’s no slow unwrapping during the season
of Advent to prepare us for celebrating Christmas. Pentecost simply comes and goes on one special
Sunday out of the year. The liturgical
colors suddenly change from white to red on one Sunday in the entire year and
then go to green for a very long time, until just before Advent begins.
But
Pentecost just might be the most important Christian holiday, although it seems
to be terribly misunderstood, even perhaps by me until most recently.
The last thing Jesus told his
disciples to do before he ascended into heaven was to go back to Jerusalem and
wait there for God’s promise to come true.
They would be baptized by the Holy Spirit, he told them, and that they
would be clothed with power. With little
or no idea what any of that meant, they did as they were instructed. They went back to Jerusalem – not to the
temple but to an ordinary room in an ordinary house – and there they waited,
along with the women who had come with them, including Jesus’ mother and his brothers.
What did they do, while they waited? They simply sat around and prayed, breaking
bread together, and I expect at least some of them were asking God to tell them
a little bit more about what they were waiting for. How would they know when the power had fallen
on them? Would it tingle? Would it hurt? How did the Holy Spirit go about baptizing
people, exactly? This was all quite new
to them. Jesus had said something about
fire, which sounded kind of dangerous.
Did he mean real fire or spiritual fire?
Jesus’ instructions and lessons were never clear. They were always filled with multiple layers
of meaning. What more did Jesus want
them to learn about this Holy Spirit?
What more was involved in this baptizing?
Thankfully, they didn’t have to wait
long for the answer to their prayers, because of the day of Pentecost, a Jewish
festival set fifty days after Passover, so roughly 5-10 days after Jesus had
ascended to heaven, they were all together in one place when the Holy Spirit
came. First there was wind, then there
was fire, then they were filled with the Holy Spirit and overflowed with
strange languages: one spoke Parthian while another spoke Latin, and two others
found their tongues curling around the exotic sounds of Egyptian and Arabic.
They may not have known what they were
saying, but the crowd they drew did.
Devout Jews from all over the world stood in the doorways and windows,
listening to a bunch of Galileans tell about the power of God in their own
tongues and languages so that no one was left out and everyone present could
understand.
And still it baffled them all, the
speakers as well as the listeners. They
were in the grips of something that bypassed reason and some of them could not
bear it, so they started hunting for a reason.
“They are filled with new wine,” someone said (drunk, in other words),
but Peter said no, it was only nine o’clock in the morning – meaning, I
suppose, that if it had been later in the day being drunk may have been a real
possibility. But not now.
Then he got up and delivered a
sensational sermon, based on the second chapter of Joel. “In the last days,” he
proclaimed, quoting Joel, who was quoting God, “I will pour out my Spirit upon
all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men
shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.” That is what is happening now, Peter tells
them. The Holy Spirit of God is being
poured out on them and this is how it looks: wind like the wind that revived
the valley of dry bones, and fire like the fire that led Israel through the
desert, and tongues like the tongues that erupted at Babel, but in reverse this
time. At Babel, God had confused human
speech so that people could not understand each other anymore; at Pentecost,
God reverses the curse. What sounds like
babble is intelligible speech – better yet, is gospel – and everyone present
understands it.
According to Acts, three thousand
people were baptized that day. It was a
miracle. It was the birthday of the
Christian church, when a dozen bumblers received power from on high and
proceeded to turn the world upside down.
What happened in that room spread from Jerusalem to Athens to Rome to
Alexandria. It spread across nations,
across centuries, across cultures as far removed from Israel as we are from the
moon. Because of what happened in that
room, people who do not speak a word of Hebrew have come to believe in a Hebrew
God, who is worshiped today in every language on earth.
It happened by the power of the Holy
Spirit, which the Bible talks about in at least two ways. First, as the abiding presence of God in
Christ, with all the safety and comfort that relationship promises. This is the Spirit most of us know and love –
the Spirit of peace and love, the Spirit of comfort and grace – the one that
smooths our ruffled feathers and revives our weary souls, the one that is with
us always, whenever we have the good sense to breathe in and say thank you.
But there is another way that the
Spirit acts – not a different spirit, but rather another manifestation of the
same Spirit – that is not nearly so comforting.
This is the Spirit who blows and burns, howling down the chimney and
turning all the lawn furniture upside down as the winds of a tornado do. Ask Job about the whirlwind, or Ezekiel about
the chariot of fire. Ask anyone who was
in that room on Pentecost what it was like to be caught up in the Spirit. It is a transformational moment when nothing
you know is the same anymore.
When I was visiting my aunt in Dallas,
Texas about 35 years ago, I went to her church. It was not a Presbyterian Church. It was a Full Gospel, Pentecostal Church,
where the service lasts hours long. There
was a huge choir, a band with full instrumentation, and a sound system that
would make any professional theater manager jealous. There was a church full of several thousand people,
who drifted in during the first thirty minutes of the service. Sunday school attendance was announced, the
collection was taken, other business of the church was announced, and then the
music began to build – listless at first, the band warming up, a soft hymn-type
melody in the background, then gathering volume and focus until the service was
in full swing.
For two full hours, at least, we sang
and clapped and raised our hands in the air.
Children stood stomping on their feet in the aisles or on the pews or
they crawled around underneath while their mothers praised God and danced in
place. All of the songs had pounding
rhythms that built and built until people began to be “slain” in the Spirit, as
they say. One woman right in front of me
bolted from her pew and ran around the perimeter of the church twice, shouting
in a language I couldn’t understand, while another one nearer to the front
stood up and did a jerking dance until she fell on the floor. An usher rushed forward and threw a white
sheet over her so that her undergarments wouldn’t show, and several members of
the church knelt around her, praying again in words that were unintelligible to
me until the convulsions stopped.
Being a good and upright Presbyterian
unused to behavior such as this in a church setting, I felt like I had been
caught up in the middle of a terrible tornado and thrust into a new land of Oz,
where there was a land of fairy-tale people and make-believe characters. So, I did what any normal strait-laced
Presbyterian would do: I made myself very small and held perfectly still until
it was all over.
Lightning did not strike, which was an
answer to my constant and silent prayer, but in the years that have followed
that experience I wondered about my reaction.
Was it simply a reaction to that kind of worship or was it more than
that? If I had been in that room on the first
Pentecost day, what would I have done; welcomed the Holy Spirit with outstretched
arms, raising my hands in the air, reciting poetry in a foreign language, or shrank
in fear?
I’ve often wondered since that experience
whether we Presbyterians have not taken the Holy Spirit seriously and have perhaps
lost our way in God’s intention for the church.
Maybe that’s why we’ve been shrinking in numbers year after year. However, that thought has changed completely
since my time in Europe last year. I wrote
about these experiences on my blog during my Sabbatical but let me elaborate on
one of them and glean some deeper meaning for today.
One of my first experiences was going on
a Tapas tour in Madrid Spain, which meant that a local guide gathered a bunch
of us foreigners together and showed us around the city going from one
restaurant to another and sharing small plates of local foods – which are
called Tapas, small plates. There were 7
of us in the group altogether. Our guide
was from Madrid and spoke Spanish, some Italian, and English. One woman was from Milan, Italy another was
from Rouen, France, a third from the Netherlands somewhere, and a couple from
Dusseldorf, Germany, and lastly myself.
All of us tried to use English as our common language with various
degrees of success. We spent about 5 hours
together going from one restaurant to another, tasting delicious food, drinking
local specialty wines and aperitifs and speaking about where we were from, our
livelihoods, our adventures, and even our hopes and dreams. At the last stop, although the official tour
was over, we all decided to spend the rest of the night enjoying each other’s
company at a final bar/restaurant. Here
a group of guys joined us that had known one another since they were 2 years
old, now living in different parts of Spain and Europe, but were back in Madrid
for the local Football game (or what we call Soccer). Smart phones appeared in everyone’s hand as
we all tried to communicate in, at least, five different languages using Google
translate, and even with lots of ridiculous hand gestures.
In a foreign land surrounded by people
I’d just met, in the center of people from all over the world, communicating
with one another in joy and celebration about just being human together –
talking about what we love, who we love, what we do, why we do what we do, and what
we believe in, when the knowledge of the true power of the Holy Spirit came to
me.
Stephen Garnaas-Holmes in Unfolding
the Light, wrote it perfectly; “The real miracle of Pentecost wasn’t the
momentary wonder of people speaking languages they hadn’t been taught, but the
lasting miracle of people making connections despite all their separations,
discovering how they were alike despite apparent differences, knowing belonging
despite their being foreign.”
They were one on
that first Pentecostal day long ago, just as my temporary group of evening travelers
and revelers were one; the boundaries did not exist. They and we found a shared story, tapped into
the one Spirit that breathed in us all.
Again, he writes;
“Wonder at this (for Pentecost): not that you could speak some foreign language
but that you could love someone who speaks a foreign language, knowing by listening
that your hearts speak the same language, you and they breathe the same Spirit,
one breath in all of us, members of one body.”
Something divine
happened that day at Pentecost so long ago and something divine happened that
night in Madrid for me, partly in my own heart and partly in theirs. For, it was then that I realized that God’s Spirit
hadn’t come only to my aunt’s Full Gospel Pentecostal Church with people
running around speaking in foreign languages no one understood or convulsing in
the aisles with arms raised and songs of praise being sung. No, God’s Spirit is alive today, out in the world,
connecting people to people. I also
realized that we Presbyterians haven’t missed the Holy Spirit as it was manifested
in my aunt’s church. No, we’ve missed
the Holy Spirit because we’ve become too much of a club that isn’t out in the world
connecting with people who are different from us. That’s why we are shrinking.
Pentecost is our reminder that shakes
up our Presbyterian outlook on life, one that can set us on fire, transform our
lives, and can even turn the world upside down.
Today, may we welcome the Holy Spirit – alive and at work in the world
around us and suddenly be transformed into one body, loving one another and caring
for one another.
Thanks be to God.
AMEN.
Offertory –
Doxology –
Prayer of Dedication –
Lord
of wind and fire, of hope and mercy, we ask that You bless these gifts
today. We praise You for them and ask
that You cause them to be put to work for Your kingdom. In Christ’s name, we pray. AMEN.
Closing Hymn – Breathe on Me, Breath of God Hymn #316/393
Benediction –
Go from this service with the joy of the Holy Spirit. Feel the power of the holy wind and fire in
your lives. Go forth into God’s world as
God’s own children, emboldened and encouraged to share the gospel, live as
examples of the good news in your own lives, and make disciples. AMEN
Postlude
