Acts 2 AGAIN - Pentecost - by Don Neuendorf
OK, so here we are again. We read a part of this story a few weeks ago, the sermon that Peter preached on Pentecost. Now the reading includes the sound of rushing wind, the tongues of flame, the coming of the Holy Spirit, and the gift of languages.
Does this add anything?...
I hope that doesn't sound disrespectful. I don't mean that the coming of the Holy Spirit is irrelevant. It was the Spirit speaking through Peter's sermon that achieved the mass conversion of 3,000 people. We said before it certainly wasn't Peter's magic words.
But by that same token it was not the gift of speaking in different languages. It was not the tongues of fire. It was not the sound of wind. The miracle, to us, is always the visible stuff - the remarkable stuff. But the miracle here was the invisible working of the Holy Spirit.
Churches today still try to recapture that Pentecost Sunday. They try to reenact it by bringing together large numbers of people, by creating amazing spectacle, and then by preaching sermons calling for people to ask Jesus into their hearts. And they total up the number of people who "come forward" and the number of those who receive Christ. Our own church body has begun to fall prey to this.
There's nothing wrong with bold celebration of the Gospel, but we are deceiving ourselves when we're satisfied with the external things. Jesus said that he came "to testify to the Truth." And that is the measure of where Jesus' work is going on.
And that's a good thing, isn't it? Because Pentecost events don't happen much, even in Pentecostal congregations. Giant mass conversions are not the norm. Instead, the Holy Spirit rushes, as Jesus said, like the wind. And here and there, where he can get in, he awakens new life. In the hospital ICU in the middle of the night, in the coffee shop conversation between friends, even in the midst of persecution and poverty, when the Word of God is forbidden and yet God's people bring Christ to their neighbors and fellow inmates.
God works. He keeps working. Even when we cannot see it.