Happy Pentecost! Today is the Feast of Pentecost, one of the three most important days of the Church Year. You have Christmas, you have Easter, and you have Pentecost, the Holy Trinity of Feast days. Pentecost is as important as the first two, although it doesn't quite get the celebration that they do, but for the Church it is just as important. Today is the day we often call "the birthday of the Church."
What do we mean by that? We mean that on this day about two thousand years ago, the Church began. Before this the disciples had been following Jesus, then he died, and he rose, they had all kinds of encounters with him, then he ascended and they were trying to figure out what all of that meant. At this point they were all keeping to themselves, they were not being the Church.
This day, the Feast of Pentecost, (pente means fifty, so Pentecost is fifty days after Easter) was already a Feast day: it was fifty days after Passover, a Jewish holiday, a harvest holiday that celebrated the giving of the law to Moses. So the disciples and Jews from around the world were gathered there in Jerusalem to celebrate Pentecost when this remarkable thing happened that we heard in our reading from Acts, of the Holy Spirit coming down and lighting on the disciples like tongues of flames. There was a rushing wind when the Spirit came. The Holy Spirit came and empowered the disciples, enlivened the disciples, to go and finally do what Jesus had told them to do, to go into the world and proclaim the Good News, to preach the Gospel, to make disciples, to be Christ's body in this world, to do the things that Christ did. At that moment, three thousand people were baptized that day after they heard about Jesus, and from this moment they started gathering together, continuing the Apostles' teaching and fellowship in the breaking of bread and in the prayers, as the Book of Acts says. On this day they became the Church, a group of people with a purpose and a mission in this world. And so we celebrate this moment.
The first half of the Church Year has been following Jesus on his incarnate journey. We talked about this last week when we talked about Ascension, and how Ascension is the end of that journey. Jesus came down at Christmas, went down into death, started coming up at the Resurrection, and all the way back up in the Ascension. The Disciples, during that whole journey, are with Jesus once he started his ministry in adulthood. They, and we, are following Christ's body on that incarnate journey, seeing where it is going, learning from it. But on Pentecost, which begins the second half of the Church Year, it shifts, and now it is about the Disciples who are empowered to go and be Christ's body in this world.
This means that during this year we are going to keep learning about Jesus because we have to figure out what Jesus was all about, to understand what Jesus is all about, to keep learning from Jesus so we can be his body in this world. To be Christ's body means to be his loving hands and heart, to be the feet that carry the love and compassion and grace and mercy to people in need. We have to keep learning what Jesus taught, how he healed people, and how he nourished people because we have to go do those things if we are going to be Christ's body in this world.
But there is a shift. A shift from focusing on Jesus's journey to taking that journey ourselves and seeing how we are going to be his body in this world. That is what Pentecost is all about. How it is that we are empowered by the Holy Spirit as well. The Holy Spirit did not just come down two thousand years ago. The Holy Spirit continues to come down to us, to empower us, to enliven us, to comfort us, to support us, to care for us. The Holy Spirit continues to come down.
One of the times the Holy Spirit came down was at your baptism. The Holy Spirit came to you and pulled you into the Body of Christ. You were reborn by the Spirit as water was poured over you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. At that baptism we made several promises. If you were old enough you made the promises on your own. If you were younger, your godparents and your parents made the promises on your behalf, and promised to help teach you about the promises. In a few minutes we are going to renew those promises, renew our Baptismal Covenant.
We start with a fairly simple question: Do you reaffirm your renunciation of evil and renew your commitment to Jesus Christ, to which we all say "I do." Then we will have three questions which are about the nature of God: Do you believe in God the Father? Do you believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God? Do you believe in God the Holy Spirit? Our answers to each one of these questions is the Apostles Creed broken out in parts: Do you believe in God the Father? I believe in God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth. Do you believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God? I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord. He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, etc.. and so on. Do you believe in God the Holy Spirit? I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sin, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.
These responses are important. It tells us about who God is, but the most important part of the responses is the word "believe". We often think of belief in God as a simple do we think that God exists. But that is not what the Creed is asking, it is not what the baptism promises are about. It is not, do you believe that God the Father exists? This belief is similar to when you tell your kid, I believe in you right before they go out there on the stage for a play, or out on the field before a soccer game. It is that kind of belief, that confidence and trust sense of belief. Do you believe, do you have confidence, to you have trust in God the Father? Yes, I have confidence in the God who made the entire world. Do you believe in, do you have confidence in, do you trust God who came down as Jesus Christ? Yes, this is the God I trust who came down to live our life, to be one of us, and bring us back up to God. Do you have confidence in God the Holy Spirit? Yes, I put my trust in God who continues to work in this world through the communion of saints, through the Church, continuing to be here with us. I give my confidence over to this God.
Remember the Creed was written in Greek. The Greek word translated as "believe" literally means "to give one's heart to." Another way to think about this is, Do you give your heart over to the God who made the world, the God who came down to be here as one of us, and the God who continues to work in this world?
After we say the Apostles Creed in parts, when we reaffirm and proclaim the God we give our confidence over to, the next five questions are asking us, so what? What does it mean for our lives that we put our confidence in, that we give our hearts over to this God? So we make a series of promises about what the implications are of this affirmation of faith. We will continue in the Apostles teaching and fellowship and the breaking of bread, and in the prayers, just like the earliest members of the church did as we read in the Book of Acts. We are going to try not to do bad things, but whenever we do, not if we do, we will say we're sorry, we will repent, and come back and try again. We promise to proclaim by word and example. It is important to remember that our very lives are proclamations. Whatever we do in our life can never be separated from the fact that we are followers of Jesus Christ, that we are Christians, that we are part of the Body of Christ. Our lives are a witness, an example to this world. We are going to proclaim, through our words and through our example, through our lives, the Good News of God in Christ.
Fourth, we promise that we are going to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves. The two parts of this promise are those wonderful passages from: Scripture, Matthew 25 in which Jesus says, I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink. People ask, when did I ever see you hungry or thirsty? And Jesus says, whenever you do it to the least of these, you do it to me. Jesus is in, Christ is in other people in the hungry, and the thirsty, and the stranger, and the prisoner, in the sick, in the naked, Jesus is in those people. So we are to seek Christ in other people.
To love our neighbors as ourselves comes from the Greatest Commandment: what is the greatest commandment? To love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and soul, and love your neighbor as yourself. On these two hang all the law and the prophets. We promise here to love our neighbor, seek and serve Christ in all persons. Loving our neighbor as ourselves is the fourth promise.
Finally, the fifth promise is to strive for justice and peace among all people, respecting the dignity of every human being. To respect that image of God in every person, that image of God in which every one was made as we learned in the creation story. We are to respect the dignity of all people.
These are the promises we make at baptism. This is what it means to live a life empowered by the Holy Spirit. This is what it meant to be Christ's body in this world. When you think about it, these promises are rather audacious. Who can do any of this? And so in every single response we don't say, Yes, of course I can do that. We say, I will with God's help because we need God's help to do it.
My friends in Christ, on this Pentecost day remember how the Holy Spirit came down to empower and enliven the Disciples on that Pentecost day two thousand years ago. But don't stop there. Remember that the Holy Spirit continues to come down. The Holy Spirit came down at your baptism to pull you into this life, and the Holy Spirit continues to come and encourage you, to support you, to empower you to do his work, to be Christ's body in this world, that Body of Christ that we have been following in the first half of the Church Year. Now it is time for us to live it, to be Christ's Body with all of the grace and mercy and love that it entails.
AMEN
