Serm 1 Pentecost A

Acts 2: 1 - 21
Ps 104:23-35,37
I Cor 12: 3b-13
John 20:19-23

The Gospel is another case of the standing joke, the ordinary made to appear extraordinary, so that we can see how extraordinary the ordinary is.  The Disciples, like all of us, already have the Holy Spirit, as part of the natural world.  But we -- and even they -- are not aware of this fact, nor taking advantage of this presence. So Jesus here focuses them on this reality and gives them a clue to what to do with it.

Notice, Jesus doesn't say "I give you the Holy Spirit," either factually nor performatively.  but "receive".  This sounds fairly polite and mild, like receiving an honored guest.  But the Greek, while it can mean that, mainly means "snatch, grasp, hold on to, seize"  It is what you do when you conquer a city, or take a captive.  So the disciples are being told not just to acknowledge that they have the Holy Spirit but they are wrestle with it to get their advantage from it.

The first lesson is the more familiar, the eponymous, lesson for today.  Here again we have a dramatic display to call attention to the indwelling spirit and an immediate application (?  it is not clear whether the Pentecostals actually spoke in a dozen different languages -- more or less at once -- or whether they spoke their Aramaic or ghetto Greek and got a simultaneous translation for each listener into his own tongue),  And, as promised, the first fruits of this were a new heart of flesh, not stone (the alternate first reading) and true community in all things.  But as the single cell became many cells, complications arose, involving, among other things, a notion that some gifts of the spirit were better than others and so Paul has to come and make (yet again, in all likelihood) the point that all are necessary for the whole and that each person is unique and thus receives of the spirit the gifts s/he can uniquely contribute to the whole.  Without any of them, the whole is incomplete (and so -- going beyond Paul -- the body is not fully functional until all are in it.  And yet, since all are in it in the sense of being connected, perhaps unawares, to the spirit, the body can function in an automatic sort of way)

Clearly, our task is to recognize the spirit within us and to direct ourselves under its guidance to the fulfillment of the community, body.  And chief among those tasks is arousing the recognition within others.  And the way to do this is love.

[Don't  forget ShekinNAH, the crazy gal. who goes against convention and gives us the strength to do so for what she says is right -- not caught by the Hymnal, not dovish, etc. "Every time I feel the Spirit" is better ...]