"Into the World..."

Sermon: Pentecost Sunday year A

The Rev. Anne Kennedy

The Church of the Good Shepherd

Good Morning!

I know most of you were expecting to hear another installment from Matt this morning, tying up some loose ends from his series on the tasks of the church, but he needed a week off, so I'm here to talk about Pentecost. Pentecost, for those of you who are new, is the moment at which the Holy Spirit came down on the Apostles as tongues of fire, filling them and forming them into the new church. Matt has been talking about Peter's sermon right after this event—if you remember, the apostles, filled with the Holy Spirit, began to speak in many different languages and the people in Jerusalem who heard them thought maybe they were drunk. Well, this morning, I want to concentrate on the many different languages part. Turn with me in your Bibles to Acts chapter 2 verse 6.

Amazed and astonished, they asked, "Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs-- in our own languages we hear them speaking about God's deeds of power."

Anyone here speak more than one language? Before we got married in order to impress me, Matt told me he spoke Spanish but it turned out not to be true. Ok, not a lot of second languages, how many of you took another language in High School? French, German, Spanish. Any Latin? Anyone have to take Latin?

So, what's the purpose of learning another language? Any ideas?

To communicate, ostensibly, not just to pass high school. The purpose of going through all that pain and agony is so that you can communicate with someone, hopefully even a lot of people.

Many churches, maybe we can do it next year, when it comes time for the Gospel reading, have many different people stand up and read the passage in other languages, so that we could have a sense of how amazing it might have sounded to be in Jerusalem on this day—to hear the rush of wind, and then uneducated big burly country men speaking difficult and complicated languages, all at the same time. God wasn't just showing off here—although it would have been cool to witness this first hand—he was doing two important things.

First he was pushing the disciples out into the world and opening their mouths to share their faith. You'll notice here, that they are all gathered together in a room by themselves. They aren't out knocking on doors trying to find people to tell about Jesus. Who knows whether they would have thought of doing this on their own, even after many weeks. Probably they would have just stuck it out on their own, saving the wonderful news of Jesus, maybe for their kids, but not much beyond that. So, here, the Holy Spirit is first mobilizing and empowering the disciples to do what they normally wouldn't do—share the good news of Jesus.

Second, the God was expanding and broadening the church to include the whole of that same world.

As a quick aside, Jesus did this some while he was on earth—include the whole world. He reached out to Samaritans, gentiles, women, poor people, sick people—but he stayed in Israel, he didn't go to any other countries, and while he was alive, his disciples were so thick headed they didn't know what he was doing, and even if they had known, they probably wouldn't have copied him. It took the powerful kick of the Holy Spirit to move them outside of their limited small world view and into contact with the whole world.

What do I mean by ‘the whole world'. Well, I don't mean every person. Not everyone, in every place, in all time, comes to faith in Jesus and enters into eternal life. Most people don't want to. They don't want to give up being the most important thing in their own lives. So they don't accept Jesus. Rather, by the whole world, I mean people from every language, every ethnic group, every country, every culture will come into the family of God through Jesus Christ, will hear the Gospel and accept it and begin to read the Bible in their own language, where they are and learn about and love Jesus from their own world view, their own perspective. That's what I mean by the whole world—every culture, every nation, every language. There's a beautiful vision of this in the book of Revelation, every language, people, and nation gathered around the throne worshiping God together—a picture of what life will be like for us when Jesus comes back.

Why would it be important that the whole world be apart of the Kingdom of God , the Family of God? Turn with me to 1 Corinthians chapter 12, beginning at verse 12. “The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts, and though all its parts are many, the form one body. So it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.”

This is taken from Paul's long discussion about the church as a body—it should be a familiar passage to you. Every part of the body is important, the eye can't say to the foot, I don't need you, the heart can't say to the arm, I don't need you. Every part of the body needs every other part of the body, and Christ is the head. This body image is generally read with the smaller local church in mind—like ours. Each of us have gifts been given gifts that sustain and uphold the body. No one of us is any more important than anyone else. We've been brought together on purpose by God to be his body, to be connected, to be one.

But Paul's image of the body doesn't just apply to the local church, its applicable to the wider, world wide Body of Christ—each Christian church, in every place, in all time is part of the body and Christ is the head. Each place where Jesus is prayed to and worshiped and obeyed and loved is essential, has gifts that the rest of the body need, and I'm not just talking about material need, material gifts. I don't mean that rich churches send poor churches money and call it mission. I mean that each church's perspective on Jesus, each church's culture and worldview is so different, so important, that the body is really poor, the church world wide is really poor, if we live isolated and separated from each other.

For those of you who don't already know, most of you do, I grew up in Africa . My parents are missionaries, in fact, my dad is a linguist. That means the language part is really important for him. Their mission group's goal is to translate the Bible into every language on earth, so that people can hear the good news of Jesus Christ, and read about it in their own mother tongues. Imagine, for a moment if you had to learn Spanish in order to become a Christian? If every time you wanted to read your Bible or come to church, you had to struggle to understand everything in Spanish? How many of you would make the effort to come? And even if you knew Spanish really well, there would always be a little something missing, a deep emotional response or need in you that could only be fully satisfied by hearing about Jesus' great love for you in the language you know and understand best, in this case, English.

Well, this is a luxury for most of the world—to have the Bible and hear preaching in your mother tongue. The church in the village I grew up in, in Farakala, does not share this luxury. The people in the village all speak Senefo—a hard enough language on its own. Guess what language the church operates in? Any guesses? Its called Bambara. And its actually very different than Senefo. So in order to go to church, you have to be able to understand, at the very least, a whole different language. If you want to read the Bible for yourself, you've got to know it even better.

That's not the vision in Acts chapter two verse 6. In that case, the Holy Spirit gave the disciples a supernatural gift, gave them the ability to do something completely beyond and outside of their expectations, and used that new ability to grow the church in a powerful way. The Holy Spirit is here, this morning, to give us gifts as well, gifts that will grow the church, this church, the whole Church, the whole Body of Christ. At the risk of running myself into a sermon series of my own, I'll not promise to talk about this more next time, although, as you can imagine, I have much more to say about mission and the world and languages and the work of the Holy Spirit. Let me close with two things. First, I hope you will pray for Matt and I the next few weeks as we prepare to go to Africa and visit the church there. I ask, as you pray, that you think of a gift we might give as a whole church—a gift that will build up the Body of Christ.

And second, in our local body here, as you pray this morning and pray this week, ask the Holy Spirit to fill you and show you what work he has for you. When you become a Christian and give your whole self to Jesus, the Holy Spirit comes and lives inside you and gives you everything you need, he gives you more than you need, he gives you a gift that you didn't have before—not just a spiffed up version of something you already had—a new gift, a new something to share that will help build up the body. Pray about it and then come talk to me or Matt about what you think that gift might be and how you can use it.

Amen.