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June 04, 2006
Status in the Kingdom of God
Ruth 1: 15-18
John 3: 22-36
June 4th, 2006
The Feast of Pentecost
Today is Pentecost, as we have been reminded at the start of today’s service. We are accustomed to remembering Christmas and Easter. Few Protestants remember Pentecost. Today we’ve tried to do a bit better. Why, when there is nothing in the New Testament about celebrating special days? In fact, to the contrary, the Apostle Paul wrote to Christians in Colossae about special days: “Let no one pass judgment on you . . . with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath.”
One way the religion of the Old Testament is very different from that of the New Testament is that the ancient Israelites were required to celebrate three great pilgrimage feasts to Jerusalem: Passover, Pentecost, and the Feast of Tabernacles. “Three times in the year you shall keep a feast to me,” Moses told the Israelites. These feasts at first were family celebrations. But then they expanded and became all-Israel events.
Why? Well, for more than one reason. They brought the people together so they remembered they were part of a great family with a common heritage that identified them. It was a way of keeping connected as God’s people.
But there was more than this. In Deuteronomy we read: “You shall rejoice in your feast, you, and your son and your daughter, and your man-servant and thy maid-servant, and the Levite, and the sojourner, and the fatherless and the widow, who are among you . . . You shall surely rejoice.”
We read in the 100th Psalm, “Let all the earth make a joyful noise to the Lord. Serve the Lord with rejoicing.” This may well have been an antiphonal song the Israelites sang when they gathered for these feasts. Whereas the daily routine of sacrifices was probably tiresome, even gruesome, the great feasts were happy events. At the last of these feasts young women would dance before young men hoping to attract their future husbands.
God gave three great feast days to ancient Israel to remind them of the on-going life with God that was their call—and that it was a happy thing to be God’s people. Little did they know that in each of these three feasts God was pointing to the length and breadth of His love for the whole world.
They had no idea, for example, that at Passover, many years after the Exodus from Egypt, that a first-born Son born in the family line of Judah would die for the sins of the world. All they knew then was that a first-born son died in a lot of Egyptian homes long ago as part of their deliverance from bondage in Egypt.
They had no idea that at Pentecost when they read the Book of Ruth together, that this story of a Moabite woman’s merger into the family line of the greatest king of Israel anticipated God’s reaching out to the whole world through the seed of Ruth, David’s great-grandmother. We listened this morning to those beautiful words of Ruth to Naomi, that remind us of what Jesus said to us, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” At Pentecost we remember not only the coming of the Holy Spirit one day long ago; we remember He has not forsaken us.
And it was beyond their dreams that at the third great feast, Succoth, a feast of in-gathering the harvest, they were remembering year after year that all nations would be gathered to Jerusalem. From Jerusalem springs of living water would flow to refresh every thirsty person.
Nobody at the time realized this was what Jesus was talking about in what we read in John 7: 37, “On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and proclaimed, ‘If any one thirst, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me, as the scripture has said, “ Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water”.”
And then John lets us know what this meant: “Now this he said about the Spirit, which those who believed in him were to receive.” Jesus used this last Jewish Feast of Tabernacles to proclaim the refreshment He would offer to all who come to Him to drink. It was the feast when we non-Jews were welcomed into the fold of God along with the physical descendants of Jacob.
If these feasts were so important to the Jews why were no counterparts established in the New Testament for Christians? Why are we not commanded to be happy together three times in the year? What a great antidote times of happiness together are to the woes of life that hound us! Laughter is great medicine, and all the more when it is prompted by the joy of the Lord.
I don’t know the answer to this question. Maybe the reason why we were not given Christian feasts is that the Jewish feasts come too infrequently. In Acts 2 we read of the early Christians that they broke bread together often, from house to house. We are to entertain each other often, being together over good food, sharing our homes week in and week out. We’re to have LOTS of church dinners. In these regular moments we suture our bond in Christ. These are our feasts that bring happiness.
Or maybe we were not commanded to celebrate formal three-times-a year feasts because the more organization there is the more incidental structure develops. And where there is structure there is administrative authority to make sure things get done. And where there is administrative authority people with strong temperaments rise to the top of the structure. And thus within the Church there develops the very thing Jesus said was not the case in the Kingdom of God. In the Kingdom of God the one who is master and Lord serves those over whom He has authority. But in the kingdoms people develop, those on top boss those below them on the totem pole. Jesus taught us: Do as I say; Do as I do!
We read this morning John the Baptist’s words that should echo loudly through every congregation: “He must increase but I must decrease.” Josephus tells us that Herod put John the Baptist to death because he feared this humble man was gaining too much political muscle. Little did he know how little interest John the Baptist had in political power. The last of John’s desires was that he could rule over people. His whole way of life rejected the things ordinary people consider important: comfort, security, status, or power. “Jesus, the Master who served, must increase; I must decrease.”
John the Baptist said this in the course of a conversation he had with some of his followers who had been talking with a Jew—which probably means a Pharisee, one concerned with interpretation of the Bible. John’s followers asked him about Jesus—to whom he had pointed one day as he baptized people in the Jordan River. John said then, “See, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” But this One of whom John spoke stood in line with sinners to be baptized. And now he was baptizing, or his followers were doing this as Jesus looked on.
John the Baptist’s disciples thought that only their leader did this kind of thing. Why was Jesus baptizing?
John was not in the least threatened by the people coming to Jesus for baptism. He called himself a “friend of the bridegroom,” with Jesus the bridegroom. In other words John said, “Everything is about Him; I’m just His friend. I am thrilled at the sound of His voice. I’m completely happy because I see people coming to Him.” Remember that in the other Gospels we read that John said, “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord’.”
Here we read John the Baptist’s words that point toward Pentecost, “He whom God has sent utters the words of God, for it is not by measure that He gives the Spirit.” And John’s Gospel here concludes with those stunning words I remember so often: “He who believes in the Son has eternal life; he who does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God rests upon him.”
Last week I closed reminding you of Bonhoeffer’s words that echo this truth of Holy Scripture: To believe is to obey; to obey is to believe. We cannot get away from this. Belief is not a matter of the head alone, of the heart where great mysterious thoughts are treasured. Belief demands our whole bodies by which we become the friends of Jesus. We are Jesus’ friends if we do what He commands us. Let us NOT let our good Reformed theology of grace push to the side this clear message of obedience that is life to receive and death to reject.
What does all of this have to do with Pentecost when the Holy Spirit was poured out? That is, beyond the fact that all things are connected in one way or another? Pentecost, I reminded you, was a great feast of the Jews. It was a time of rejoicing that took place at the barley harvest, and perhaps also celebrated God’s giving the Law through Moses on Mt. Sinai.
The connection with Pentecost is clear as John the Baptist pointed toward God’s giving the Spirit fully (not by measure). The connection with rejoicing is evident in referring to Jesus as the Bridegroom. At wedding receptions there is a lot of rejoicing.
And it is in this on-going, all enveloping rejoicing that we see an important aspect of God’s gift to us of the Holy Spirit. Being together as those who trust in Jesus is rightfully a happy thing—day after day, week after week, year after year. But this rejoicing comes with a price tag—deliberate submissiveness to God. Sometimes there is tension and little rejoicing. This says to us: What do I need to do to restore the rejoicing?
Put yourself among those who were waiting in Jerusalem when the day of Pentecost finally arrived. For nearly fifty days they had been together, patiently waiting for the promise of the Father of which Jesus spoke to them. What did they feel when they heard this sound as of a mighty rushing wind, a controlled hurricane, loud as thunder yet it did not blow out those flames of fire they saw on one another’s heads? Were they conscious of what was going on? Or were they filled with ecstasy of the kind that they weren’t conscious of what was going on?
Were their desires and personalities completely overwhelmed so that they could not do anything else but go into the streets of Jerusalem with the message of the Gospel? We think it must have been this way, that the disciples who flooded the streets of Jerusalem must have been “beside themselves.”
But I wonder if it wasn’t quite this way. I wonder if as they waited patiently those fifty days against all the tendencies that work against patience in you and me, that they learned to be completely submissive to God. Patience is a good teacher. What can keep 120 people together for fifty days when all sorts of “reasonable” considerations say, “Time’s up. It ain’t going to happen. Jesus meant well but He was wrong. He’s gone and we’re left with what you see—just us.”
There have been long years in which faithful Christians have asked, “What has become of the Holy Spirit?” not realizing He was still at work. I think, in fact, of our present distress over developments in our denomination that sometimes make me feel like a feather before the wind, blown this way and then that by forces beyond me—whether within this congregation where some of you are angry at the denomination, or outside our congregation where I am a part of a larger framework.
Where is the Holy Spirit when we need Him? Perhaps we look back with romantic visions of what happened at Pentecost when the Holy Spirit just took control and made people do what they would not ordinarily do. It may have been this way, but it would not keep on being this way after this.
Indeed, even then, it was only because people were submitted together to the will of Jesus who said, “Stay in Jerusalem until you receive the promise of the Father.” Even then, had there not been a spirit of submissiveness to God, I wonder could the Holy Spirit have done that strange and wonderful work described in the Book of Acts. Submission to God is very hard to achieve. It happens from person to person. Submission means waiting beyond the bounds of patience. It means putting up with conditions that are annoying. It means seeing beyond the present moment a higher purpose at work.
And for us who cannot expect the Holy Spirit to descend again as He did on the first Christian Pentecost, it means waiting until God causes to arise within us a consensus that we will recognize as the will of God—and act on it together.
I have been reminded by quite a few people since I mailed my letter to the congregation that it is crucial what we believe. Indeed it is important what we believe. Believing right includes correct doctrine. But part of believing right is maintaining a spirit of submissiveness to the will of God—indeed to the will of God that we do not always know for sure what it is. Waiting on the Lord is never comfortable. We want to be on with things, to fix what is broken.
As Americans we’re proud of “no taxation without representation,” and of that assertive outlook that made our forebears scratch and claw a great country out of the wilderness to which the Pilgrims came.
I would urge us now to learn to wait on the Lord, to wait patiently for Him. And in due time He will make clear what is right for us to do. How long this “due time” is from us now I don’t know. But I know that being submissive to God often will require us to quietly wait. And while we wait let us be busy with believing, that is obeying our Lord Jesus in the wide range of tasks He has asked of us.
Let us look at these tasks in faith, believing that they are the agenda over which we have some control. The agenda Jesus gave us is to believe and to obey, and to do the works of belief and obedience. Among these are to walk faithfully, as individuals, the walk of faith to cherish our spouses, children, friends and to do our duty as unto God. Among these are to speak winsomely of Jesus to others. Among these are to build up one another within this congregation. Among these are to serve one another in a spirit of gentleness, undemanding, sincerely, tirelessly. Among these is to remember as our dander rises, “He must increase, but I must decrease.”
Today we come to the Table of the Lord. Look beneath that white cloth and you see the emblems of the body and blood of Jesus that He lay down freely out of submission to the will of the Father. Let us eat of Him. Let us drink of Him. Let us learn of Him meekness and gentleness of heart, and we will find rest for our souls.
O Lord, grant us to be instruments of your Holy Spirit. In our day. In this time. For Jesus’ sake. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at June 4, 2006 09:30 AM