Well! Pentecost Sunday. Today we’ll take a break from our Genesis sermon series, and resume next week. Pentecost is sort of an unusual Sunday. It marks the beginning of the church, for all intents and purposes. The beginning of the church of Jesus Christ that started when the resurrected Jesus left the earth to return to heaven, but sent the Holy Spirit to be upon and within the people of God.

Pentecost is the one time, the one Sunday when we always emphasize the Holy Spirit, one part of God’s Trinity—Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Normally, we read the texts from the book of Acts, or from the gospel of John, and try to focus on the Spirit. We take one Sunday to talk about the power, the mystery of God’s Spirit. How do you do that?

It’s not as though the Spirit of God only functions one Sunday a year. It’s not like on Pentecost we can talk about something like the inner fruits of the Spirit (Galatians: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control) and they pop up all over the sanctuary on that Sunday, and then the next week we go back to being crotchety and self-centered for the next 51 Sundays!

And it’s not like on Pentecost we can talk about something like the outer gifts of the Spirit (Romans, I Cor, I Peter: healing, teaching, administration, speaking in tongues, interpreting, prophesying) and they pop up all over the sanctuary on that Sunday, and then the next week we go back to being the “frozen chosen” for 51 more Sundays!

No, as we read what scripture says about the Holy Spirit, we find that the Spirit comes as Jesus with us, to be with us all the time, 52 weeks a year, in worship and out. The earthly Jesus accepted some human limitations and reached only a finite number of people. But through the Spirit he sent to follow Him, he can be with us, and in us…all of us, all the time. That’s an amazing claim. Annie Dillard, in her book For The Time Being, says that “only a deeply grounded and fully paradoxical view of God can make sense of the notion that God knows and loves each of the 5.9 billion of us (actually 6.7 billion now).”

I looked up in my records this week. I have preached on Pentecost Sunday six years in a row, all on the Holy Spirit. Each sermon three times. While I was at it, I noted that I also have preached three other sermons on the Holy Spirit (3x each) as we have gone through different series. I’ve taught a 3 hour Exploring Theology class on the Holy Spirit, and I’ve spoken on the Holy Spirit at 4-5 Alpha Retreat weekends.

Now, I don’t always have three points to my sermons, but if you added up all the points made in all of those sermons about the Holy Spirit…it’s a really big number. That’s why this morning I want to do something a bit different. I don’t really have a lot of points. In fact, I have just one question I’d like to ask you. Actually, one question asked five ways.

Read: John 14:25-26, 16:7-14

Pray: Lord, I pray that this sermon today would be a little unsatisfying…because it seems that if it is too neat and tidy, it surely will have missed something of the mystery and wildness of your Holy Spirit. So bring forth your Word, Lord, in power and by your Spirit.

You know, every one of the gospels tells the same story:

In Matthew - resurrected Jesus gives the Great Commission to go into all the world and make disciples, baptizing and teaching. Then, it is at least implied… Jesus leaves.

In Mark - Jesus says to go into all the world and preach good news to all creation. Then he disappears.

In Luke - Jesus tells his followers to preach the gospel to all nations…then he’s taken up.

In John - that we read from, at least 15 times as Jesus trains his followers: “I’m leaving.”

In every case, this huge mission, enormous task is given. Then Jesus leaves.

He leaves some 100 followers with the mission of introducing the kingdom of God, changing the world…with no resources, no leader, not tools. There’s no autobiography, no 10-year plan, no website, no marketing plan, no power, certainly no political power, nothing except the promises we read in John that say “Don’t worry---I’m sending the Holy Spirit.”

We lived in the middle of Minneapolis for about three years. And Minneapolis used to get windstorms. Windstorms like I had never experienced. Sometimes it would come up suddenly at night when we were in bed, flying unseen across all those flat Midwestern states where there 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.

After one especially wild night in 1998, we woke up in the morning and cautiously opened the door, feeling a little like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. We walked out into our front yard and saw that a huge branch had snapped off our 60 foot maple, bounced off our roof and smashed into the yard. But that was nothing.

The rest of the neighborhood looked like a war zone. Entire mature trees, decades old, had been knocked down, smashing dozens of houses and cars. Pieces of sidewalk had been ripped up by the tree roots as the trees toppled over. Across the city, there were literally thousands of trees down…all by the power of the wind, by the power of something you couldn’t see but you could certainly experience the effects of. I was amazed.

I wonder if Jesus’ followers felt that way on the day of Pentecost? There was the sound of wind, and this immense power fell upon them, nothing they could really see or quantify or control, but incredibly powerful nonetheless. It changed them. And they set out to change the world.

Raymond Brown, a renowned Biblical scholar, says that the claim of the gospel of John is that “the Holy Spirit is the personal presence of Jesus in the Christian…” I’m not sure we really believe that. If we did, I suspect our spiritual imaginations would be far livelier and our faith far deeper and we would see God’s hand in far more ways than we do.

Most of us are pretty systematic, safety-seeking people. We lock in. Before our faith in Christ is very old at all, we have decided that God works in a particular way, or further, that God should only work in this particular way. Our imagination shuts down, we settle in to what we know, which has is own comfort zone. Before long, comfortable becomes rigid. And, unless God chooses to uproot us and knock us over in some dramatic way, we only allow Him to operate within certain cautious boundaries.

So, my question this morning is simply What if…?

What if…God surprised you in how/where He showed up?

Anne and I went to dinner with Anne’s family & another family on Sunday night to celebrate the retirements of the her dad and a friend from being on a board of directors. So it was the two honorees with their wives, four children all together along with us spouses.

It was the end of a very full week and weekend for me. I was tired. The dinner was nice, conversation pleasant, I met some people I hadn’t known.

As the evening wound down (and I was about ready to go), from out of the blue one person asked a question of someone at the far end of the table: Have you ever had a transforming moment in your life? For the next 45 minutes, we heard from around the table…great stories of faith in Christ, of finding a passion in life, of profound learning experiences, very personal stories. It turned out to be one of those times, for me, where it suddenly felt like we were on holy ground, that God’s Spirit was very close. I wasn’t expecting it, could never have predicted it.

What if… God surprised you in how/where the Spirit showed up? Would you even notice? Would you be open?

What if the Holy Spirit directed you in some small way in your life?

If it’s true that Jesus’ sending of the Spirit was so that we might always know God’s presence, then it’s not just in the big things but the small and ordinary as well.

Probably you have felt God “nudge” you sometime to do something. Talk to someone. Ask a hard question. Pray with someone. What if you were sitting in a coffee shop with a friend who was in a tough time, and it seemed like the right thing to simply say “Could I pray with you right now about this?”

I’ve had this happen a lot. Sometimes I’ve felt that nudge and said “Could I pray with you right now about this?” Plenty of times I’ve chickened out and had to call someone later and say “I’m sorry…I felt like the Lord wanted us to pray together, and I missed it.”

No earth shattering experience. But after you miss a few, you become more attuned to follow the Spirit’s lead in small ways. And unless we do that, I suspect we won’t hear the big ways.

What if the Holy Spirited directed you in some small way? Would you notice? Would you be open? But let’s follow up with that.

What if God’s Spirit…directed you in some large, life-changing way?

A relationship, a move across the country, saying no to something in your life, a career change, whatever.

Dolphus Weary spoke last Tuesday in the parlor here at Bethany. For those who don’t know Dolphus, he’s now sixty years old now, an African American pastor and community developer for years. He’s probably particularly known for his association with John Perkins (who preached here last February) and for his work in Mendenhall, Mississippi. It was a wonderful thing to gather with a group of people from across the city, across racial lines, across several churches and listen to Dolphus talk about race relations.

Dolphus wrote a book several years ago called “I Ain’t Comin’ Back.” It tells part of his story, growing up in very poor, very rural Mississippi. Dolphus made it out by accepting a basketball scholarship to a school in California and becoming one of the first African American students there. And as he left Mississippi, he knew only one thing: “I ain’t comin’ back.” Too much poverty, too much hardship, too much pain, too much racism.

In California, Dolphus began to get excited about work in missions overseas. Here’s what he writes: “And during that six weeks God was speaking to me- only He wasn’t telling me to give my life to the Far East. Incredibly, He seemed to be telling me to go back home instead, back to Simpson County, back to the pain and problems there. There was no dramatic turning point when I made my decision. It was just a conversation that went on for six weeks. Gradually a conviction grew inside me that God wanted me in Mississippi.”

God’s Holy Spirit spoke to Dolphus, through some key people, and a growing conviction, about something BIG. Returning to the one place he didn’t want to go. And amazing things happened. It’s fair to say that Mississippi is a different place because of what God has done in these 30+ years.

What if God’s Spirit directed you in some large, life-changing way? Would you notice? Would you be open?

What if the Holy Spirit prompted you to worship him in a way that was different than you’d experienced?

Many of us have this fear about praying out loud, or reading or speaking a word God puts on our hearts in a public worship time like this one. What are we afraid of? Actually, I read a story from John Ortberg that describes exadtly what I think we’re afraid of. Great story. There was a service at a Pentecostal church, where people will often stand up and speak very authoritatively to the congregation (as occasionally happens at Bethany, but regularly in this church). One night, a man stood up and declared “Thus saith the Lord: Even as I was with ABRAHAM when he led the children of Israel through the wilderness, so I will be with you.” Then he sat down.

His wife nudged him and whispered something. He quickly stood back up and said “Thus saith the Lord: I was mistaken. It was Moses!”

We are afraid sometimes, aren’t we? That we’ll say something wrong, do something wrong. We get nervous when a word from God comes, or if something happens that wasn’t in the bulletin.

We often have a time of waiting on God, listening for what the Spirit might be stirring up in our midst. What if the Lord put a scripture on your heart to read? It just popped into your mind, but you had never spoken out in worship and you never thought you would. This happens all the time. And I hear about it later, someone will call me and say “You know, Dan, when that scripture was read in worship, it was like God put it there just for me.” One person’s sheer, anxious act of obedience was a life-breathing gift to another person.

We might ask the same question about other things in worship. What if you raised your hands? What if God led you to pray something? Or start a song? Or to speak in tongues, or to offer an interpretation?

What if God’s Spirit prompted you to lead out in worship? Would you notice? Would you be open?

What if the Spirit of God was present in our community here? How would we tell? What would be the telltale mark?

John 16 said one of the many things the Spirit does is convict us of sin. So what if the sign that the Spirit was alive and well…was that we were moved to confess our sins, to God and to one another?

Now, we have space to do that in each service, which is great. But you know as well as I that can be a rich time…or totally dry. It can be us sitting in the pew, trying to conjure up some little thing we did wrong this week. Or it can be a profound time of confessing to God that we want to be people turned towards him in all things, and have failed miserably in doing so.

What if the mark of the Spirit’s presence here at Bethany was not something about the style of worship, or our missions or our youth program or small groups, but that we were people regularly being convicted of our sin? Would we notice? Would we be open?

What if…? What if God surprised us? What if God’s Spirit desired to blow in a fresh way? What if a windstorm of God’s Spirit blew through our life, even knocked down some of those ancient and stable trees that had been rooted there forever? Would we notice? Would we be open?

Let’s pray.