As a hospital chaplain, occasionally I meet a patient who doesn’t speak English and usually when that happens, the hospital has already placed a computer monitor in the room where I can select the patient’s language or dialect and call a translator. Without the translator, the patient and I wouldn’t be able to understand each other. Our differences would be obstacles. The translator brings understanding. And because of that understanding, the patient and I both receive the gift of the visit.
In Scripture, we have many different names for the Holy Spirit – wisdom, advocate, helper, spirit of truth – but today I want to think of her as translator. In the scene from Acts, when the Holy Spirit descends upon the disciples, they begin speaking in tongues, and crowds who are drawn to the noise witness their speech but instead of hearing nonsense, the people each hear their own languages being spoken. And in that moment, God’s people understand the power of the Holy Spirit’s presence among them.
And while we celebrate this appearance of the Holy Spirit, it’s important to remember this isn’t the first encounter God’s people have had with God’s Spirit or ruach. This same Spirit blew over the earth in Genesis 8, causing the flood waters to subside; it fell upon David in First Samuel 16 when he was chosen to be king; and it knit together the dry bones in Ezekiel 37.
And the Acts story isn’t the first Pentecost either. Pentecost already was, and is, in Judaism, a celebration of God’s provision - of the harvest and of the Law that was given to Moses on Mount Sinai. God appearing in the Holy Spirit adds another dimension of God equipping God’s people with all we need.
We celebrate this story as God doing something new, because in Jesus we have known the brokenness and sin that hung him on a cross, the joy of his resurrection and the hope promised at his ascension. Jesus promised we would not be left alone.
Like the Pentecost church in Acts, the Holy Spirit helps us understand how God works among us in surprising and sometimes hidden ways. As we have persevered through the pandemic, we have experienced anew death and resurrection. There were ways of being together that died; there was division and there was grief. And yet, in the midst of it all, God was at work. There were places where death did its work, and places where new life was being nurtured to spring forth.
Today we celebrate that one of the ways God has been at work is in shaping Emily Richards and Ford Turner as disciples or followers of Jesus. At Ascension, confirmation follows three years of students attending worship and serving as acolytes, and meeting with me to study the Bible, Martin Luther’s catechism, and how our Lutheran faith frames big questions we encounter in our lives. We were interrupted in March 2020 but then we regrouped and learned alongside other youth in our synod on Zoom and in person with Pastor Mike Collins and some of the youth at Emanuel Lutheran in Lincolnton. Today Emily and Ford will make for themselves the promises that were made at their baptisms, as we pray over them and anoint them.
In the Lutheran study Bibles that we gave Emily and Ford this morning, I wrote the words of Jeremiah Chapter 29 Verse 11 on one of the front pages. There the prophet says, “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.”
As we celebrate their confirmation, by the Spirit’s power in and among us, our whole community is renewed and empowered to be God’s witnesses throughout the world. We are invited to live into the new thing that God is doing, instead of trying to erase or forget the past, or to recapture or return to what was. The Jesus story isn’t archived history; it continues in our lives today and in our future.
Especially on this Day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit is our visible reminder that we have this hope alive in Christ.
Amen.
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