Presence and Purpose
June 11, 2000
Pentecost Sunday
Pastor Dan Baumgartner

Note: Three days earlier, Mary Pence, Bethany’s beloved organist and member passed away after battling cancer.

Somebody asked me after the first service how I was feeling…and I’ll tell you. I’m feeling a little sad, missing Mary this morning. And I’m feeling kind of joyous because it’s Pentecost and it’s time to worship, and I love to worship. And I’m feeling scared to death, because I feel as though you don’t need the sermon I had prepared. And if you know me at all, you’ll know that I’m most comfortable having thought through most of the words that will be coming out of my mouth. I’ve always admired people who could write down on a napkin at a coffee shop what they were going to say…and I find myself with a sort of napkin here this morning.

We’re going to read just a little bit of the rest of the story from Acts 2, and then pray, and then we’ll see what God does this morning.

Acts 2

Maybe some of you are feeling a little alone this morning. It strikes me that Peter and the others may have felt terribly alone. They’d gone from experiencing this high, of being with Jesus in his ministry, of seeing the things he did. But now he’s gone, and even the resurrection appearances are over. And they are alone. It’s not a good feeling. It’s not a good place to be. And as they sit there alone, perhaps in a room, Peter and the others, this wild and amazing thing happened...something they never could have imagined. Friends, Pentecost, if it says nothing else (and it says many things)…it says to me, “We are not alone.”

Pentecost was the breaking through of God’s Spirit. So it is not just a God of history that Peter was sitting and thinking about, even though Peter experienced God in time and history. But it wasn’t JUST a god of history, but it was a LIVING, Active, present God…who would never leave them. They would never be alone again. God showed them that there on that Pentecost when the wind started to blow, and tongues of fire came down. That wind blew…and reading that reminded me of living in Minneapolis … which we did for three years.

Minneapolis used to get windstorms. My, we used to hear the wind come up at night, come flying unseen across those flat Midwestern states (because there’s not a hill higher than 100 feet to stop it!), and we’d feel the windows shake and rattle and wonder if they were going to break. One morning after a storm like that we woke up and walked outside and almost keeled over. The neighborhood looked like a war zone. Huge branches had broken off of trees, whole mature trees had tipped over and smashed houses and cars. Pieces of sidewalk had been ripped up by the tree roots as they were knocked over. Literally thousands of trees were down across the whole city…all by the power of something you couldn’t even see.

That’s some of the power, I think, that Peter and the others felt enter into that room, and enter into them. Then the fire came that they could see, and the fire separated into tongues and fell upon each individual person, and before they knew it they were speaking in tongues that they didn’t even know, that they’d never learned, that they never could have imagined. But others from different countries could understand them perfectly, something of the wonder and the mystery and the awe of God. It wasn’t something you could put in a little box or package. It wasn’t just a little god of history you could respectfully deal with. It was the living, present, active God.

I look at this speech that Peter made, and it made me laugh. I love Peter. Bumbling Peter through the gospels, bumbling Peter who couldn’t even a few days before say that he even KNEW Jesus…couldn’t say the words “Yes, I knew him.” Yet here is Peter. I’m sure he couldn’t even imagine himself being there. Peter stands up and starts to speak. I bet he was a little nervous too…he might have been working off a napkin himself. And he says,

“You know friends, I need to tell you about Jesus.
I need to tell you all about JESUS, JESUS of Nazareth.
Yes, the same JESUS that did signs and wonders.
The same JESUS that God sent among you.”

(Listen…you can almost hear Peter is starting to roll now…because the Holy Spirit is coming, and one of the things the Holy Spirit does is point us to Jesus. And so Peter keeps going, and his tongue is getting a little looser.)

“JESUS, the JESUS YOU wouldn’t believe in, THAT’s the JESUS I’m talking about! The JESUS you wrote off, the JESUS you crucified as a criminal, the very same JESUS God raised up from the dead, the JESUS that God used to destroy death, yes THAT JESUS. The JESUS that promised us when he left for heaven that we’d never be alone because he’d send the HOLY SPIRIT, THAT’s the Jesus I need to tell you about…and that’s the SPIRIT that’s moving around here right here and right now!”

(I think Peter might have been a Pentecostal preacher…he’s rolling.)

But God’s Spirit was moving, and there was no stopping it. He couldn’t have imagined it. But Peter was talking about a living God…and I want you to hear that this morning. If you’re feeling alone…it is a living God, in the present, that we follow.

I tried to think back through this last week…and this is probably a good thing for all of us to do sometimes. I tried to think back, and remember where I had seen the fire come down, where I had heard the wind in these last weeks. And I realized again how easy it is for us to have these wild things happen…and we just miss it. We have our eyes so closed, or our minds so set that we don’t even see what God is doing. Sometimes we get so in control that we have to play just the right music, or have the speaker set just right, or I’ll have the right set of notes and somehow that will push all the right buttons, and THEN God’s gonna be here in our worship. And that’s not what it’s about at all. God longs to be with His people in our worship. And He comes to be among us in ways that we could never imagine. And even when we come in here, this very respectable group that we are, and sit…God longs to move among us and do things among us in powerful ways.

And so I tried to think back through these weeks. And I thought about last Sunday in church. Last Sunday, a friend of ours showed up unexpectedly here from Princeton. His mother was in her final days, all the kids had gathered from all parts of the country, it was a hard week. He walked in here on Sunday morning and here’s Lynne standing in this pulpit talking about HOPE. The whole service. And afterwards, Jamie said, “It’s so amazing you were talking about hope. On this day it was exactly what I longed to hear, what I really needed to hear…about our hope.” We don’t plan those things. God orchestrates those things. God comes and moves and the Spirit blows, and things like that happened.

Two weeks ago I went to the 7 Howe house for what I thought was sort of a routine meeting with the women who live there in the intentional community. I took my little yellow tablet and asked questions and listened to them talk about how God has met them, changed them, shaped them and knit them together in the last few years in community…about what God had done in that house. And let me tell you, it wasn’t easy. But the stories I heard…I was overwhelmed...it wasn’t what I had imagined. Only God’s Spirit can do those things. It didn’t work because we had structured it, or planned it just so. It happened because God’s Spirit came.

I’m going to tell you another story, but you have to promise me it won’t leave this room. Tuesday I was at my monthly meeting of the Presbytery’s Committee on Preparation for Ministry, that deals with people exploring full-time ministry. Let me just say…those meetings are not always….scintillating. And I was there all afternoon, and it was NOT scintillating. And then one of the candidates we were interviewing began to share part of his story. He had come to Christ in his mid-thirties, in the middle of a business career, from a very intellectual background…and he came to Christ, he said, because he came face to face with a love that was greater than what he had thought possible, than anything his mind could conjure up. The love of Christ. He discovered it in the midst of his wife battling a terminal illness. His faith was rooted SO deeply. And as he shared his story, it got very quiet in that room. I looked around the table and saw a bunch of stodgy, but very-decent-and-in-order Presbyterians with tears running down cheeks. And as Bruce shared his story, and we all cried, and I felt God’s Holy Spirit blow through that place.

Two weeks ago, somebody walked into my office. He told me that he hadn’t taken communion for thirty years, and he came. And felt God’s presence in a new and powerful way. I was at Mary’s hospital room Wednesday night, wondering…doubting, to be honest, that there was any conceivable way that Mary could last through the night to allow her daughters from Connecticut and the wilds of hiking in California to make it back in time. But you know what, she did make it through, and she had a time that next morning when all three of her daughters could be with her and she could be awake and conversational and awake and understand what was going on, and all three daughters got that time with their mom. You know what, you don’t plan those things. God’s Holy Spirit comes, and the flames come and the wind blows, and they happen.

I want to encourage you, friends…to keep your eyes open. We live in this world where the easiest thing is to close our eyes to what God might be doing. If it isn’t an earthquake or a natural miracle, we think, “God must not really be here.” But I stop, and I look around, and I see God all over the place in His Holy Spirit. Because He said that we will never, ever be alone. And so when He sent the Holy Spirit, we received that assurance … we’re never alone. We get to walk with that Spirit. It doesn’t mean that everything in life is perfect, doesn’t mean we have all the answers. It only means that God will show up in our lives. God WILL show up.