A Sermon preached at Pentecost 8 June 2025 at St. Augustine’s, Wiesbaden
Acts 2:1-21, Romans 8:14-17, John 14:8-17
This year is the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. Its most famous product being the Nicene Creed that we recite as an affirmation of faith almost every Sunday, though exceptionally not today as we have the Reaffirmation of our Baptismal Vows with its own creedal statement. And the creed we recite on Sundays is actually a version finalized some 56 years later at a second council in Constantinople. It is Trinitarian both in content and structure, with three sections each one focusing on one person of the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But in the original AD 325 creed, The Holy Spirit only got a very brief mention: That third and last section just read “We believe in the Holy Spirit.” Nothing more. Is that all we know about her? I’m using the female form as the original Hebrew word ruach is feminine and it does us good to be reminded that God is not male (and not female either – God is God)!)
Today is the feast of Pentecost (Shavuot), an ancient Jewish harvest festival coming 50 days after Passover, which later took on the additional meaning of a festival of thanksgiving for the gift of the Torah, the Law. It is sometimes also referred to as the birthday of the church, as Pentecost is that moment when that small group of men and women left their hiding places and, filled with the Holy Spirit, went out among the people and began spreading Jesus’ message, thus establishing the beginning of the Church. But most of all Pentecost is the feast day of the Holy Spirit, and there would be no church without her.
Today’s readings tell us a lot about who this mysterious Holy Spirit is, the third person of the Trinity, and how she acts. There are lots of words and phrases that have been used to describe the role and function of the Holy Spirit, but I want to summarize them today with three: Construction, Connection, and Vocation.
Why Construction? As the empowering gift of God’s creative presence, the Holy Spirit enables the building of the Church. The building blocks, if you like, are us – the church is first and foremost an assembly of people with a single purpose. The Pentecost event focuses on two constructive gifts, first on the ability to speak in other languages so that everyone can hear about and understand God’s deeds of power. On that day the purpose of that gift was so that all the devout Jews who had come for the festival to Jerusalem from the Jewish diaspora around the Mediterranean, and who were often more comfortable in the language of their home cities, could hear that message in their own language. In our reading of that passage today in nineteen different languages we had a taste of this. But in today’s world, enabling the Gospel message to be understood might not mean using a different language, but using terms and concepts that those without any religious background can understand, showing them how the relationship with God that we share is both relevant and necessary.
The other gift was the gift of prophecy – for sons and daughters, young and old, slave and free. Prophecy in the Biblical sense is not fortune telling, not predicting the future, but describing a future that is possible if we live as God intended for us, if we were to live out our calling as beings made in God’s image. And that is what the Holy Spirit makes possible. Elsewhere in Scripture, for example in Paul’s letters, other gifts of the Spirit are described as “each given … for the common good” (1 Cor. 12:7) or more specifically to “build up the church.” (1 Cor. 14:4)
My second descriptor was Connection. We already share in a common humanity, and we share one Creator with all of Creation. The Spirit, abiding within us all, strengthens and reinforces that bond. It is so close that we can be described, as Paul puts it in his Letter to the Romans, as children of God. Ideally – and sadly we know that not all families are ideal – a family is the closest connection we can have both with our siblings and with our parents and our own children. It relies on shared experiences, shared joys and shared sorrows, just as being a child of God and a joint heir with Christ, as our sibling, entails sharing in all of his redemptive activity, including the suffering, and ultimately in his glory and bounty.
And finally, Vocation – which is our response. As I said, the gifts of the Spirit are given with a purpose, they are not for us to enjoy on our own or for our own advantage, but to be used for the common good. Responding to God’s calling to act on God’s behalf – because that is what being an heir of God and a joint heir with Christ means – takes courage. We heard in the Acts passage that people did not just respond positively to Peter and the disciples. Some were amazed and perplexed, curious and excited, but others sneered and jeered and rejected them and their message. The Holy Spirit helps us overcome our fear: “For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption,” Paul writes reminding the Christians in Romen and us, that we can call on God as our Father. And the last verse of the Gospel reading this morning, that I left out of the bulletin, but read out loud, also references our fears: “Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid!”
The fear that Jesus and Paul are referring to is not just the fear of others, of how the world will react, of what might happen, but also the fear of what sounds like an enormous responsibility – am I up to it? To be joint heirs with Christ, to hear that “the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these,” is frightening. But only if we try and do them on our own and not with the help and the support and the guidance of the Holy Spirit. One term used for Jesus is Emmanuel, meaning “God with us.” The Holy Spirit is God in us.
In just a moment, when we renew our Baptismal Vows, we will promise to do all sorts of works of God: worshiping, proclaiming, serving, and transforming – but never alone, always as a Christian community built and connected by the Holy Spirit, and only and always with God’s help.
Amen.