Faith Hope Love: Bishop Christopher’s Call to Mission
Sermon outline, Pentecost 2014 - Acts 2:1-21/John 7:37-39
Introduction
Professor Gordon Fee tells a story about a student who said to him, “God the Father makes perfectly good sense to me, and God the Son I can quite understand, but the Holy Spirit is a grey oblong blur.”
He also talks about someone who was giving a children’s talk on Pentecost Sunday. She was trying to get across the point that the Spirit is real, even through you can’t see him. She illustrated her point by blowing a piece of paper off her hand. The Spirit is like that, she said: you can see the paper moving even though the wind that moves it is invisible. One six year old shouted out “But I want the wind to be uninvisible!”
Gordon Fee concludes, “So the practising creed for many Christians becomes, ‘I believe in God the Father, I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s Son, but I wonder about the Holy Spirit.’”
In Old Testament times God the Father and Creator spoke to his people through the Law and the Prophets. In Gospel times God revealed himself perfectly in Jesus, God the Son. Now, in the time of the Church, God has come to us in the person of the Holy Spirit, to show himself to us, to make us more like Jesus, and to equip us to serve him and each other. The Holy Spirit works in his Church to do this in some very specific ways.
Faith
Jesus says;“If anyone believes in me, streams of living water will flow from within him” – meaning the Spirit. (John 7:38)
The starting point is belief, faith. To believe in Jesus is to have the Holy Spirit within you. In the New Testament there are three parts to conversion. Repentance and faith; water baptism; Spirit baptism. For some, all those things come close together. For other people they are separated by years. But to be a convert to Christ, all three need to be there. The Spirit gives the faith to turn to Christ. Then as we do so we receive more of the Spirit and our faith grows.
We also need the Holy Spirit to share our faith with others. Telling friends and colleagues and neighbours about Christ can hard. We may feel nervous. We may not get a positive response. We may be unconfident about what to say. The first disciples felt the same. One moment they were sitting in a room waiting. The next moment they were out on the streets, telling others about Jesus. 3000 people became Christians that very day. The difference was the Pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit upon them.
Hope
Paul prays:“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” (Romans 15:13)
One of the great needs in our world today is hope. When we watch the news or look at the struggles in the lives of people we live – or our own lives – it is easy to become despondent and to lose hope. The disciples must have known that. In the days between the crucifixion and the resurrection we know they shared in that experience. Even after the ascension they could easily have become discouraged as they wondered what was going to happen now they no longer saw Jesus among them.
And then the Holy Spirit was poured out on them. Because God is a God of hope, to be filled with his Spirit is to overflow with hope. That hope spills out in boldness and courage, a willingness to try risky things for God.
One of the things that is most striking about the Christians in the book of Acts is their courage. For example, in Acts 4 Peter and John are arrested, jailed overnight, and then threatened with dire consequences if they don’t stop preaching about Jesus. Peter and John return to the rest of the church, and they pray a marvellous prayer which includes the line, “Now consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness.” They don’t pray for protection. They pray that boldness would overcome their fear, so they would not be put off evangelising by the real threat of persecution – which of course came soon enough. We may not face situations like that, but we do face situations where we need to be bold and courageous for Christ. The Holy Spirit gives us the hope that enables courage.
Love
Paul writes: “Those who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption. And by him we cry, ‘Father.’ The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.” (Romans 8:14-16)
The Holy Spirit living within us breathes into our hearts the truth that God loves us and has chosen and adopted us into his family. That’s how we experience his love.
It’s also how we are helped to love God in return. When Paul says that “God has poured his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit” (Romans 5:5) he is talking about his love for us, of course, but also our love for him. Sometimes people find it hard to love God or to feel his love for them. Their relationship with him seems dry and loveless. It is the Holy Spirit who opens the door into an experience of mutual love between us and God.
The Spirit also enables us to love others. “God is love, and those who live in love live in God” says St. John (1 John 4:16). But that doesn’t mean that love always comes naturally to us. There are times when we struggle to find love for others, and some people who we find test our love particularly hard! But the Spirit helps us to live in an experience of God’s love which naturally flows out into love for others.
Faith Hope Love: Bishop Christopher’s Call to Mission
Over the last two years we have had as a focus for our diocesan life Bishop Christopher’s call to engage with these three values of Faith, Hope and Love.
(Here you may wish to share some stories or testimonies of how your parish has engaged with this call, and the impact it has had.)
Today is an opportunity to celebrate all that has happened over these two years as we have focussed on these aspects of our faith together. It is also a reminder that only by the life of the Holy Spirit within us - received from Jesus as we come to him and drink – can we grow in our faith, our hope, our love, for the sake of God’s glory in the world.
A poem
“Pentecost”
Today we feel the wind beneath our wings,
Today the hidden fountain flows and plays,
Today the church draws breath at last and sings,
As every flame becomes a tongue of praise.
This is the feast of Fire, Air and Water,
Poured out and breathed and kindled into Earth.
The Earth herself awakens to her maker,
Translated out of death and into birth.
The right words come today in their right order
And every word spells freedom and release.
Today the gospel crosses every border,
All tongues are loosened by the Prince of Peace.
Today the lost are found in his translation,
Whose mother-tongue is love, in every nation.
(Malcolm Guite, from Sounding the Seasons)
A prayer
God of faith, deepen our faith
so we may bear witness to Christ in the world;
God of hope, strengthen our hope
so we may be signposts to your transforming presence;
God of love, kindle our love
so that, in a fragile and divided world,
we may be signs of the faith, hope, love
which we share in Jesus Christ. Amen
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