Pentecost: Ordinary and Amazing

Jesu Juva

Acts 2

May 31, 2020

Day of Pentecost A

Dear Saints of Our Savior~

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets. . . . It’s the Day of Pentecost—exactly fifty days post-Easter—the day when the Ascended Christ breathed out the Holy Spirit upon His tiny church, taking it from a mere 120 souls to over three thousand in one day.

You know the highlights of that day: the sound of a rushing wind, tongues of fire that came to rest upon the apostles, and the miraculous preaching and proclamation in a multitude of languages. Jesus had promised His disciples that they would be clothed with power from on high; and that promise was fulfilled by the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost. It was a great day—a grand a glorious day—a day of power and prophecy designed to draw people in to hear the good news about Jesus.

However, that first Pentecost was also an ordinary day—a routine day. There are some parts of Pentecost that were just plain normal. Nothing to get excited about. The amazing, extraordinary stuff is easy to spot: the wind, the flames, and the languages that left people bewildered and amazed. And don’t forget Peter’s powerful preaching, how he told the assembled crowd how the Jesus they had nailed to the cross was now alive forevermore—that He is both Lord and Christ, raised from the dead, and exalted to the Father’s right hand. Those parts of Pentecost were thrilling and spine-tingling.

But what brought thousands of Jewish pilgrims together that day in Jerusalem was actually rather routine and ordinary. Very traditional. Pentecost was an ordinary, expected, routine festival in the Old Testament. God’s people had been celebrating Pentecost for centuries. It was a well-worn, annual harvest festival—not too far removed from our November Thanksgiving celebrations. Pentecost was as routine and predictable as turkey and pumpkin pie. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t important. It was. Yet God chose this routine, annual holy day to stage a grand opening for the Holy Spirit and to usher in the first day of the last days.

Later on in Acts 2 we learn of how those first believers lived under the Spirit’s guiding. And for the most part, it was a life without thrills and chills and excitement. It says, “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42). Well, okay. That sentence doesn’t exactly give you goosebumps. The life of those very first Pentecost Christians wasn’t filled with miraculous special effects. Instead, they regularly, routinely, ordinarily gathered together for preaching and liturgy, feasting and fellowship. Nothing glamorous about it. It was simply God’s people gathered around God’s gifts, slowly and steadily growing in faith and good works—all orchestrated by the Lord and Giver of Life.

What does this mean? It means that your life of faith will be shaped both by things that are ordinary, and by things that are amazing. The work of the Holy Spirit in your life will be both routine and exhilarating.

We need, first of all, the slow, steady, regular, unremarkable, predictable patterns produced by the Holy Spirit. You need a slow and steady dose of God’s Word—of our Lord’s body and blood—of prayers and praise and liturgy and hymns—just like you’re getting here this morning. Here you can dive deeply into the mysteries and mercies of God. It’s all rather ordinary and predictable. But it’s what we need. It’s part of what the Holy Spirit gives us.

You sometimes hear people criticizing this part of the church’s life. They complain that liturgy is too formal, too predictable, too boring. “It doesn’t let me express myself or do things my way,” they say. And that’s exactly right! The ordinary liturgical life teaches us to subdue our selves, our wants, our tastes, our likes and dislikes—so that we can more deeply understand what it means to be the one body of Christ—to be the one, holy Christian and apostolic church. We need that—to be less self-centered and to be more Christ-centered.

But just as much as we need the ordinary and routine work of the Holy Spirit, we also need the extraordinary and amazing work. For the church has just as many sinners as she has members. The old Adam in us would love nothing more than to fall asleep, to make the life of faith a dead routine, to engage in liturgy and hymnody and pew-sitting as a clever disguise—a disguise to hide our sinful self-satisfaction—to cover up our complacency, our lack of real repentance and serious stewardship. Attending a church you love can always become dangerously comfortable—a deadening routine in which the old Adam makes us feel proud and “spiritual,” while ignoring the needs and burdens of those around us. We can be glad that we attend a church that preaches and teaches the pure Word of God. And, unfortunately, we can just as easily ignore that pure Word of God in every other hour of the week.

It is precisely at those moments that we need something extraordinary from the Holy Spirit—a wake-up call that cuts us to the heart. It could be a crushing blast of God’s Law that leads us to fall on our knees and cry out, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” It could be a sermon you hear. It could be a hymn you sing that stirs you from your slumbers. It could be a word of comfort or correction from a brother or sister in Christ that wakes you up—what Martin Luther called “the mutual conversation and consolation of brethren” (SA Art. IV). But behind these extraordinary events stands the Holy Spirit, who calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies the whole Christian church on earth and keeps it with Jesus Christ in the one true faith.

Perhaps the Holy Spirit speaks most clearly and most recognizably when He points us to the crucifixion cross of Jesus. Pentecost always points us to Jesus and His cross. It is finished. Everything has been done for you and for your salvation. Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ will come again. Your sins are forgiven. The Holy Spirit dwells in you. Nothing more needs to be done except to broadcast the victory. Preach it. Proclaim it. Make it known far and wide that Jesus Christ welcomes sinners and eats with them. He was delivered up for our trespasses and raised again for our justification. In Jesus God has reconciled the world to Himself, not counting our sins against us. In Him, we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

The day will come when we won’t need the Holy Spirit to wake us up from complacency or to give us the joy of Jesus. This extraordinary work of the Spirit will, one day, become obsolete. For after the Holy Spirit raises you and all the dead, and gives eternal life to you and all believers in Christ, only love and joy will remain. But from what the Scriptures tell us about heaven, we know there will still be liturgy—the regular, routine, steady and sustained praises of God sung by angels and archangels and all the company of heaven—including you.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.