Sermon 6/9/2019 “Come, Holy Spirit, Come!”
Preacher: Jo J. Belser
Location: Church of the Resurrection at Immanuel Chapel, Virginia Theological Seminary
Text: Acts 2:1-21
Day: Pentecost Sunday
A man I know received a letter from his father when he was in college. The letter told of his parents’ recent experience at their Episcopal Church. There was a kind of DANCING! … and hand-waving … and apparently his parents had participated.
The student was stunned. His father had been a spy in World War II, the very DEFINITION of calm under fire. He was the Mayor of his large and influential city; he knew all the right people and how to act. He and his wife of many decades, the student’s mother, attended an Episcopal Church each week, a church full of just the right people and always of good and proper order. WHAT had his PARENTS been doing DANCING and WAVING THEIR HANDS in church?
The couple’s children thought their parents had gone stark raving mad. At first. “Except,” they began to wonder, “just how does one tell the difference between a case of the Holy Spirit and dementia?” As they began to ponder this question, the answer became apparent. Dementia meanders, has no purpose, simply endures whatever comes along, repeats itself. Holy Spirit gives meaning and purpose to life, provides direction and goals beyond itself.
Over time, this couple’s children noticed differences in their parents’ lives: More time at church. Pledged more. Helped people more. They—and this was embarrassing—used the Jesus word in public.
That was then. Today the couple have gone on to their new life. Their sons are priests and their daughter a medical doctor. All have been missionaries, and all have founded Episcopal churches in this country and in others. None started out to do these things; apparently the Holy Spirit can be contagious.
Pentecost didn’t just happen once. On Pentecost in 1998, then-Pope John Paul II urged Roman Catholics around the world to open themselves to the Holy Spirit again, they had during the Second Vatical Council, as they had at the original Day of Pentecost. He pointed to these great moments in the Christian Church’s history when the Holy Spirit had brought a new reality into being. He said, in part:
Whenever the Spirit intervenes, he leaves people astonished. He brings about events of amazing newness; he radically changes persons and history.… He makes [us] fit and ready to undertake [the tasks he gives us to do]. (Lumen Gentium, 12…)
The thing is, we must be open to the Spirit—as we at Church of the Resurrection apparently have become. “Come, Holy Spirit, Come!”
