Consumed:Life

 May 19 2024

Acts 1:6-11, 2:1-4

         The other day my Dad and I carpooled with a young man to go to a Mens Breakfast. As we were chit chatting on the way there, it was mentioned that May 6 was Ascension Day. Most people don’t realize that, for the Amish, this is a Holy Day, that is observed by a worshipful attitude so for them it is a day of rest much like a Sunday morning. Now that might surprise people, it surprised the people who were staying in our AirBnb because their plans to shop in Amish country came to a screeching halt, at least for that day. Yet what surprised me even more was that the young man who was driving, upon hearing about Ascension Day, looked at us as if we were speaking of same strange weird holiday he had never heard of. Now, I know that this young man has been involved in church for most of his life yet here he was very much surprised to learn that Jesus ascended into heaven forty days after Easter. He admitted that he had never heard that this is how Jesus got to where he was right now. He had just assumed that when he rose from the grave, he rose up and never stopped rising up until he hit heaven. Well, needless to say, Dad and I were rather dumbfounded and we tried our best to set him straight.

Now, you too might be wondering, just what is the big deal about knowing that there is a holiday that the church observes called Ascension Day? Does it really matter if we know that the risen Jesus spent forty days after Easter teaching the disciples before heading home? The importance for us is, as Jesus tells us in the sixteenth chapter of John, “It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you.” You see, right from the beginning of his ministry, when Jesus came to be baptized in the Jordan river, John prophesied that this Jesus, that he had baptized, this was the one whom the Holy Spirit had rested upon in the form of a dove, this Jesus is the one who had come to baptize with the Holy Spirit. In other words, if we have not come to the part in the story where Jesus floods the world with the presence of the Holy Spirit then the story of Jesus is not finished. So yes, Jesus did not just zip off to heaven just to get out of town; no, Jesus waited forty days before he ascended up to the Father so that the Holy Spirit might be given to us in the name of Jesus.

We understand, almost instinctively, why Jesus needed time to prepare his disciples for the coming of the Holy Spirit, because can’t we admit it, we too need time to prepare ourselves for his coming. I mean, we have some reference to knowing God as our Heavenly Father because of having fathers. We also can relate to Jesus because, hey, he’s one of us, a real living human person who just happens to be God as well. But then we come to talk of the Holy Spirit and for most of us our eyes glaze over. There just is no connection for us to help us to begin to understand this God who is a mystery and a riddle. This is why we might say that the Holy Spirit is the God who makes us rather uncomfortable just because he is so hard to get to know and to relate to. And honestly, it doesn’t help that when we read the story of Pentecost it comes across to us as come episode of Stranger Things, or some weird sci-fi movie. I mean, they heard the roar of a storm yet we are told that no one felt the wind moving; there were flames of fire and yet there was nothing burning. There were people suddenly speaking languages they had never known before this day and others who heard strangers speak to them like the folks back home. There is added to this, an accusation that these followers of Jesus have become day drinkers followed by Peter suddenly able to keep his foot out of his mouth long enough to give a sermon for the ages. So, yes, the coming of the Holy Spirit brings with him a lot of questions, and too often we never take the time to find answers to those questions.  What we can say about the Holy Spirit is that it would be wrong for us to somehow believe that he is so other worldly that he has no real purpose for this world that we live in. Nothing could be further than the truth. No, as we look deeper into this admittedly very different story we find that the coming of the Holy Spirit is really more about the ordinary rather than the mysterious, more about the every day than the coming day of the Lord.

         So, lets go slow and try and figure out just what this day called Pentecost, with the Holy Spirit’s appearing, is all about. Perhaps the best place to begin is to know that this holy day we call Pentecost has been selected for this moment by God for a very good reason. When we go searching for that reason we find, in the twenty-third chapter of Leviticus, that Pentecost was a harvest festival, the festival of what was called the first fruits. These first fruits are, as the name implies, the bringing before God the very first fruits or grains of a families harvest. God instructed his people that before any grain could be harvested or made into bread, a portion had to be taken and ground into flour and made into two loaves of bread. The family would then wrap up the bread, select the other other required sacrifices that had to be made and then begin their pilgrimage to the Temple at Jerusalem so they might offer their gifts to the Lord. All of God’s people knew that this festival of the first fruits was to happen fifty days from their celebration of Passover, thus the name Pente(fifty) cost. The purpose for this festival was so that the people of God might show their faith in God because they were giving God the very first and the very best of their crop. Through their sacrifice they were stating that they had confidence that the God who had graciously provided the first portion would give them the remaining harvest and make it meet all of their needs. 

So, once we begin to understand this festival of Pentecost a little better, then we can also understand why Jesus spoke to his disciples about the kingdom of God for forty days before the celebrating of this festival. The disciples were to realize that they were to going to be the first fruits of the coming kingdom. I have to believe that when Jesus told his disciples stories of the greatness of life under his rule, he did so that those who were listening might long for God’s kingdom to come. It reminds me of a quote by Antoine St. Exupery, who said that, “…if you wanted to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give  orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea” This is exactly what Jesus was doing, teaching them to desire passionately the unshakable life that can only be found in the kingdom of God. This life was not some far off fantasy but was instead, the very One who was seated with them, teaching them. Here was none other than the very One they had witnessed being nailed to a cross, the one that they had seen go into the tomb and had remained in that grave for three days. But here Jesus now was, and he was very much alive. His is the life that conquered death. How can we not imagine that the disciples longed to know more about this life, a life that seemed to be the fulfillment of what they knew had been promised in the book of Isaiah. There, in the twenty-fifth chapter, God promises his people that one day he would make, “…for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined. And the Lord God will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. Our Lord God will swallow up death forever and he will wipe away the tears from their faces…”. How long they had read these words and believed them to be nothing more than someone’s wild imagination. Yet here the disciples were, sitting and eating around the table with the risen Jesus, the image found in Isaiah becoming much more real to them. 

Well, when those blessed forty days with Jesus had come to an end, Luke tells us that Jesus ascended to the right hand of the Father. The disciples returned to the upper room, and there, Luke tells us, that the disciples devoted themselves to prayer, and as we are told, in most accounts,  they were of one accord. This, unfortunately, simply does not convey what happened in that upper room. No, what was actually happening is that this little group of disciples were becoming unified in their passion for life, this kingdom life that Jesus had taught them about. You might say that they were consumed with longing for the life that consumes death. We have to wonder just why were they so consumed with passion for this kingdom life and to satisfy our curiosity we are going to take the next few weeks looking at this Pentecost experience.  

One thing we do know is that the power that fueled the passion in that upper room came through prayer. The prayer that became their heart’s cry was the same prayer that Jesus had taught to them when they had asked him how they were to pray. I believe that Luke wants his reader to remember this teaching moment because this passage found in the eleventh chapter, explains so much about the experience of Pentecost. In Luke’s account of the Lord’s Prayer, he begins with the disciples watching Jesus pray. They had to be curious as to just what it was on his heart. So they wait for him, and, when he returns to them, they muster up the courage to ask Jesus to teach to them how to pray like he had prayed.What catches us off guard about Lukes account of this teaching of Jesus is that his version of the Lord’s Prayer is quite a bit different than what we are accustomed to praying  Here in Luke, Jesus gives us a very stripped down version, stating only “Father; your Name be holy; your reign come; give us each day the right amount of bread that we need; and forgive us our sins; and we forgive all indebted to us; and do not bring us to testing.” Yet this is not all that Jesus teaches us here because he goes on to tell a parable about the certainty we can have that God will answer what we are crying out for in the Lord’s Prayer. We can be certain of God answering our prayer not because of how great a friend we are with God; no, God answers this prayer because he is a God of honor, a God known to always be true to the promises that he makes. Therefore since the certainty of God to answer this prayer is based on his character alone, we are free to ask, and keep asking, and we can be sure God will give to us what we are asking for. We can seek and keep seeking, in the certainty that we will find what it is that we are searching for. We can knock, and keep on knocking, and at last, we can be certain that the door will open. Jesus then goes on to tell of how even earthly fathers know how to give good gifts to their children, so how much more will the Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” Here, Jesus catches us off guard, doesn’t he? We began praying a prayer for God’s kingdom to come and Jesus says that we should be passionate in praying this prayer. Yet when Jesus comes to wrapping things up, he does not say that the kingdom we have prayed for will be given to us. No, Jesus, out of the blue, says instead that what we will be given to us is the Holy Spirit. What Jesus wants us to do is to realize that when we cry for the kingdom it is the Holy Spirit who is given to us. The reason for this is that it is the Holy Spirit who gives to us this kingdom life that we plead for. So, what this means is that in praying the Lord’s Prayer we can know that the Holy Spirit will assure us that God is indeed our Heavenly Father. In the presence of the Spirit, then, we will know that the name of God is holy. And in the power of the Spirit we will be certain that the kingdom of God has at last come upon the earth. The Holy Spirit is the one who convinces us that our Heavenly Father will, every day, give us all that we need for life. In the Spirit’s presence we will be embraced by the Father’s mercy and through that same Spirit we will join our Father in the healing of our world through the forgiving of those who are indebted to us. And lastly, in times of trial, the test meant for us will be lifted from us by the Holy Spirit who will speak for us. This kingdom life then is given to us by the Holy Spirit who is the life giving God who gives to us the very life capable of swallowing up death forever.

The disciples remembered this teaching on prayer that Jesus had given to them and they cried out in desperation.They were unrelenting in their passion  to receive this indestructible kingdom life.They asked, and they sought and they knocked and they pounded on the doors of heaven pleading for the kingdom to come. They longed to be one of the first to draw resurrection air into their lungs. Just as the first fruits brought to the Temple by the people of God were gathered in before the full and final harvest, here in that upper room were those who could be considered to be the first fruits, the first of those given kingdom life, given to them even before the day of the full and final harvest at the end of the age. 

          The day of Pentecost then, helps us to know who we are. We are to know ourselves as being the first fruits, the first whose lives are consumed by our passion for the coming kingdom of God. We are to be the ones who plead for the kingdom in prayer before God. We are the ones who seek out where the kingdom life is being given through the Holy Spirit, the life giving God. We are the ones who knock and keep on knocking for the doors to heaven to be opened so the Spirit might come upon us like a mighty wind. What we must not forget is that the first fruits given on Pentecost were given as a sacrifice consumed by fire upon a holy altar. So too, in that upper room, those who were the first of the first fruit, were also consumed by fire, but this fire came roaring down from heaven as the Holy Spirit fell upon the altars of their hearts. Their experience cry’s out to us, and asks us, are we ready to be consumed in our passion for this kingdom life, this life that will one day swallow up death forever? I believe that Pentecost experience is an experience that is still out there waiting to be given to all who are willing to pray, and pray with passion for the kingdom life to be our life. Oh, Holy Spirit, precious giver of life, give us this life, always. Amen!