Happy Pentecost! Here’s the worship service for Sunday, May 31, 2020, at St. Peter Lutheran Church, an ELCA congregation in Greene, Iowa.
This week, we’re looking at Acts 2:1-21 and why Pentecost might be the most important holiday for the church, at least right now. The full online service below includes greetings from ELCA missionaries Rachel Eskesen and Zachary Courter as well as a special multi-lingual Lord’s Prayer.
Thank you to Rev. Jason Chesnut of Ankos Films for the dramatic gospel reading, and to the Association of Lutheran Church Musicians for the Pentecost “Virtual Hymn” recording.
Here’s the podcast audio & full service video:
What do you think is the most important holiday in the church year? Remember, that word comes from holy day, a day set apart from all the other days, something that stands out. Which one is the most important?
I suspect most people’s first answer would be Christmas. It’s certainly the day the most people attend worship. If you’re only going to make it in the church building one time per year, it’s probably for Christmas Eve service. Part of it is that we get to sing familiar Christmas carols, and there’s something very special about the sanctuary lit by candlelight, but Christmas isn’t a bad contender theologically either. It’s the story of Jesus being born, God coming to earth, entering into creation to live with us. Jesus being born as God in the flesh is key to our faith as Christians.
The other main contender for most important church holiday is probably Easter, especially if you include all the events of Holy Week, in particular, Good Friday. On Good Friday, we see the extent of God’s love for us, how far God is willing to go to complete the incarnation begun at Christmas. Jesus takes our sins and puts them to death on the cross, dying so that we might live.
Then on Easter morning, he proves God’s forgiveness, proves the ultimate enemy death is defeated by rising again. Easter’s another day when we get a lot of people in worship. Maybe even more than Christmas, it’s the linchpin of the Christian story. If Jesus is alive, then it’s all true. If he’s still dead, if the tomb isn’t empty, we’re all wasting our time.
So what’s the most important holiday for the church? I want to include my favorite, Ash Wednesday, where we’re forced to encounter our own mortality and reminded to live in light of our death, but Ash Wednesday can’t really top Easter and Christmas.
Today, though, I want to propose to you that Pentecost is if not the most important holiday in the church year, at least the most important holiday for the church.
It’s not usually the best attended Sunday, probably because there aren’t big cultural traditions built around it. Christmas has Santa Claus, Easter has the Easter Bunny, maybe Pentecost should have the Penta-dove?
But this is the birthday of the church! This is the moment when the disciples go from being afraid and hiding in locked rooms—feeling isolated after Jesus’ death, guilty after his resurrection, and just confused after his ascension—to finally getting it. This is the moment when they come out of their hiding places and start to change the world.
Peter—Peter! The apostle who’d abandoned Jesus, who’d denied he knew him, Peter gets up and starts to preach. We only get the beginning of his sermon here, but you can read the rest yourself in Acts 2.
As we heard two weeks ago in worship, before he died, Jesus had promised his followers they wouldn’t be left alone after he was separated from them. Even though he’d be gone, God would not leave them as orphans. The Holy Spirit would come to them to be their comforter, their advocate.
At Pentecost, that promise is fulfilled. God’s activity in the world shifts from the physical, human body of Jesus to the mystical Body of Christ, the church, the people of God joined in faith throughout time and space. God moves from walking around with the disciples to working through them.
It’s been tough during the pandemic for us not to be together in-person to worship. Holidays in particular have been strange, but at least for Easter, we could remember that the first Easter wasn’t a huge celebration either. The disciples were hiding in a locked room when they heard the good news.
But if there is any moment in the church year when the church ought to be gathered together in-person, it’d be Pentecost. Look at the very first verse of the reading: “When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.” The believers, about a hundred and twenty of them, are all together in Jerusalem. They’re following Jesus’ instructions to wait for the promise of the Father to be fulfilled.
And as they’re gathered together, it happens. I don’t know what they were waiting for, and I’m pretty sure they didn’t either, but suddenly there’s the sound of a rushing wind and tongues of fire, and the Holy Spirit shows up and fills them.
But look at what happens then. They start speaking in other languages. Now, what you might not know is that Pentecost was an existing Jewish holiday. You can read more about that on your own, but for this story, it’s important to know that because of the existing Pentecost festival, there are a lot of people camped out living in Jerusalem, Jewish people who have traveled from all over the ancient world.
These people aren’t believers in Jesus. Most likely they’ve never heard of Jesus. And if the Christian believers had stayed in the house where they were sitting, they never would have.
But when the Holy Spirit comes, the believers start speaking in different languages, and the only reason to start speaking in different languages is to go talk to the people who are outside the house. Pentecost is a good time to be together, but perhaps it’s a better time to be apart, to be out of the church building.
It’s been frustrating in the last couple weeks to hear people talk about the church being closed. I appreciate that I haven’t heard this from people in our congregation, but there’s been language floating around about when the church will “reopen.”
Now, I hope we can gather in worship soon, and the church council is meeting this week to talk about what needs to be in place for us to resume gathering safely. But Pentecost is the perfect time to push back against this perception the world has that the church is closed. Pandemic or not, the church is not the building; it’s the people. I saw a sign that read, “The church is not closed, it’s deployed.” and I think that’s exactly right.
The work the Holy Spirit calls us to do depends on us leaving the building and maybe not speaking in tongues, but speaking, testifying, witnessing, serving outside of the church building, in every-day life. And at some point, when staying apart out of love for our neighbors is no longer needed, we’ll return to the building to gather each week, and each week, we’ll be sent out again to go in peace to love and serve the Lord.
In the last few days in Minneapolis and across the country, we’ve seen yet again powerful examples of the world’s need for the message we proclaim, the message of God’s love for all, the message of those other holidays, that God has come into our world and has died so we can live.
This broken world desperately needs to hear the message that all people are created in the image of God and deserve to be treated with respect. The world needs the witness not of violence and destruction, but of Christians standing up for both justice and peace, protecting and caring for their neighbors.
The world needs the witness of Holy Trinity Lutheran church, an ELCA congregation located on the same block in Minneapolis as the third precinct police station. They’ve been providing their property as a medical aid station in the midst of chaos and violence.
We need to repent of the sin of racism, of treating fellow children of God as if their lives don’t matter, as if they’re somehow less than. We need to repent of the sin of thinking violence is the answer, the sin of seeking power over others, the sin of coming to quick judgments. We need to repent of our fear and our apathy, of the excuses we find to keep our faith confined to a day or a building, protected from real life. We need the Holy Spirit’s help!
In this Pentecost story, it’s clear the Gospel is for everyone, regardless of language, skin color, social standing, gender, age, vocation, or ability. The Holy Spirit is leading us, equipping us, calling us to cross borders and boundaries and languages and cultures to proclaim good news, the coming of the Lord.
Pentecost is important because this is the day we remember who we are as God’s people, filled with the Holy Spirit, equipped with whatever we need to do God’s work. Even though we are physically apart right now, you are still claimed in the waters of baptism as God’s people, as the body of Christ. You have called upon the name of the Lord, and you are saved, you are forgiven, and you are set free to live as people of God.
Amen