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Spanish Springs Presbyterian Church, Sparks, Nevada

May 11, 2008

Acts 2:1–21

1 Corinthians 12:3b–13

John 20:19–23

“The Mission of Love”

For you and me, twenty centuries after the disciples “were all together in one place” (Acts 2:1b, NRSV), Pentecost is a date on a calendar, one that changes from year to year depending upon when Easter occurs. Indeed, when it happens to fall on the second Sunday of May, the religious holiday can seem quite secondary to the secular celebration of Mother’s Day, even in some churches. But long before Mother’s Day was invented, long before the affection that family members should have for one another was turned to profit, Pentecost was celebrated throughout the Christian community as the birthday of the church, dated from the bestowal of the Holy Spirit upon Christ’s followers.

Can you imagine the excitement of that Pentecost long ago, when, after waiting for they-knew-not-exactly-what, something totally unprecedented happened to the disciples who were gathered together? There was “a sound like the rush of a violent wind,” the book of Acts says, “and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability” (Acts 2:2–4, NRSV). But the experience was not to be a private affair, and it was not for personal gratification, nor was it meant to create a spiritual elitism. “Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each” (Acts 2:5–6, NRSV).

Here is a biblical story that Hollywood, to my knowledge, has never tackled. It’s just as well; perhaps we, each of us, should be allowed to picture it in our own imagination. It might just be too spectacular for the silver screen, even in this age of computer-generated special effects. It’s spectacular enough in the telling, and has sparked a lot of fantastic claims over the history of Christianity, not least of which is the whole matter of speaking in tongues. But it’s not at all about the disciples suddenly speaking an unknown super-spiritual language of heaven. These were words that people in other parts of the world used in common, everyday speech. What Acts is saying is that people who had come to Jerusalem from every corner of the earth for the feast of Pentecost heard and understood what the disciples had to say.

Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is 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.” (Acts 2:7–11, NRSV; emphasis here and in subsequent scripture quotations has been added)

Luke, whom we believe was the author of Acts, was clearly impressed with the supernatural aspect of tongues as of fire and the disciples speaking suddenly in foreign languages, and that scene grabs our attention, too. But we shouldn’t let our curiosity about the spectacular features of the story obscure the substance of what was going on: the disciples, only just recently fearful and disavowing any relationship to Jesus, timid and uncertain following the death of their Master, were now testifying to God’s deeds of power, and people representing every nation on earth were listening and hearing. Peter, the very one who had denied even knowing Jesus on the night of his arrest, suddenly became bold and articulate, and the others soon followed his lead. And the rest of the book of Acts shows how the proclamation of God’s deeds of power in Jesus Christ spread from Jerusalem through Judea and Syria and all the way to Rome.

But although this passage from Acts about the coming of the Holy Spirit is the story most of us think of, Luke’s account of the coming of the Spirit upon the disciples as Jesus had promised is not the only account of the coming of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament. What Luke interprets as having taken fifty days to happen after the resurrection, the Fourth Gospel interprets as having happened on the very night after Jesus’ tomb was discovered to be empty.

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “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.” (John 20:19–23, NRSV)

Hollywood hasn’t given us a movie version of that episode, either, maybe because the studios wouldn’t know what to make of it—John’s account of the gift of the Holy Spirit isn’t flashy enough, despite the implication that Jesus was able to walk through a locked door, just as he had been raised from a sealed tomb. But we don’t have to regard the different accounts as contradicting each other. It isn’t a matter of accepting one story and rejecting the other. As it so often does, John’s Gospel is more interpretive of events that Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell more journalistically. And it’s not just an issue of when it occurred. Where Luke, in the book of Acts, says that the foreigners heard from the disciples in their own language about God’s deeds of power, the first installment of the witness that the disciples were to make “in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8b, NRSV), John specifies that the Spirit-empowered mission of the disciples was the work of forgiving and retaining sins. And whereas, in Luke, the Spirit was something that Jesus had said he was going to send (and so it happens in Acts many days separate and apart from the presence of Christ, who has already ascended to heaven), in John, the granting of the Spirit is a personal delivery—as personal as Jesus’ own breath, breathed out upon the disciples as they have just verified that the resurrected Christ standing before them is the same person as the crucified Jesus who was buried in the tomb. John leaves no doubt that it is Jesus’ own Spirit that is being bestowed (the same word in Greek means both “spirit” and “breath”), and it is Jesus’ own ministry that the disciples will be carrying on. And it is inextricably related to Christ’s greeting and gift of peace.

The bestowal of the Holy Spirit, in John, is, as we noted, related to the forgiveness of sins: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained” (John 20:23, NRSV). The authority to forgive and retain sins is a power that troubles a good many Christians who are loathe to exercise what seems to be a very weighty responsibility; surely it should be up to God to forgive or not. The Roman Catholic Church points to this passage to support the practice of priests absolving people of their sins, and imposing conditions of penance in exchange for forgiveness. Protestants note that it was apparently to Jesus’ followers in general that the authority was granted; John does not limit the number of people to whom Jesus said this to a mere eleven—the twelve minus Judas. But, John says, the work of forgiving or retaining sins is what Jesus was commissioning the disciples to do, and, in his proclaiming it to the church, John wants all Christians to know that this is the church’s work whenever and wherever the church exists and is faithful. And what the church is doing when it does so is continuing the work of Jesus—“As you have sent me into the world,” he prayed to the Father on the night before he was arrested, “so I have sent them into the world” (John 17:18, NRSV). The gift that Jesus bestows by breathing upon the disciples is the gift of the Spirit which empowers the community to continue the work of Jesus. As God’s breath gave life to our first ancestor so long ago, Jesus’ breathing upon his disciples gives the church its life. A new, second creation has come into being, and it is sustained not by its own initiative, not through its own ingenuity, but only and always as Jesus’ doing. Jesus shares with his followers the life-force that dwelled in him and brought him forth from the grave.

What Jesus’ disciples are to do is no different from what he did. And that is to speak and do the words and signs that cause people to believe, if they but choose to do so. At the beginning of the Gospel of John, we are told that John the Baptist’s role was to testify to Jesus, so that all might believe through him. At the original ending of John, just a few verses after today’s reading, John tells us that what he has written is so that people might come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing they may have life in his name. In John, sin is not specific acts of transgression, but blindness to the revelation of God in Christ—failure to see in Jesus the person and personality of God. Jesus’ commission to the disciples, and their empowerment with the Holy Spirit, to forgive or retain sins, is the authority and assignment to continue what God sent Jesus to do. And that is the work of love. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (John 3:16, NRSV). The mission of each disciple and the whole church is to reveal God by showing God’s love.

To reveal God’s love the way that Jesus did is a daunting task. Just think of Jesus turning water into wine, of feeding five thousand with a few loaves of bread and even fewer fish, of crossing barriers of ethnicity and respectability and even religion, of giving sight to people long blind, of raising the dead back to life again. As we read of Jesus’ activities in John, each successively reveals more profoundly God’s power, and each successively deals more assertively with sin as John understands it—blindness to who Jesus is, the Son of God fully endowed with the Holy Spirit. “Very truly, I tell you,” Jesus had said to his disciples the night before his crucifixion, “the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father” (John 14:12, NRSV). It was as he was going to the Father that Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit upon the church to continue his work on an even broader scale. Who was still unforgiven? Who was still joyless? Who was still hungry? Who was still discriminated against and outcast? Who still could not see? Who was still bound and shut up in a tomb? The mission Jesus was giving his disciples—not just the few huddled in a house fearful and uncertain on the evening of the day Jesus’ burial place was discovered to be empty, but all of us—was to love the world into joy, to love the world into fullness of stomach, to love the world into community, to love the world into clear vision, to love the world into eternal life—to reveal God. An impossible task, you say? Not when the church is breathing in the Holy Spirit—the Spirit which is given us not to tear down, but to build up, not to separate us, but to unite us, not to condemn, but to save—the Spirit that enables us to show the whole world that God is love!

In the 1960s, a popular television show began each week’s episode with the words, “Your mission, Mr. Phelps, should you choose to accept it . . .” The mission of the disciples of Jesus Christ, week after week, day after day, is always the same—to cure blindness by giving witness to the light that reveals God in the continuing ministry of Jesus Christ and thus to raise people to eternal life. Not just attending worship, important as that is. Not just being a congregation member, significant as that is. Not just giving financially, necessary as that is. But being fully and always engaged in the mission of love. “As the Father has sent me,” Jesus said, “so I send you” (John 20:21b, NRSV). Peace be with you.