Our Pentecost Story - Sermon for Pentecost Sunday (May 24, 2026)

Scripture Readings: Acts 2:1–21 | Psalm 104:24–35 | 1 Corinthians 12:3–13 | John 20:19–23

​“Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’ ” (John 20:21-22).
 
There’s something wonderfully welcoming about gathering around a fire. When I was a young person, back in Northern Ontario, I remember spending many an evening in Summer and Fall hanging around a fire with my friends. Sometimes we’d be roasting hot dogs or marshmallows. Sometimes we’d be burning a huge bonfire of brushwood, and other times we’d sit close to a few dry logs, poking the coals with sticks to stir up the flames. Those are good memories… times I look back on warmly… moments when the main agenda was just spending time together. Sharing unspoken fellowship as we watch the flames dance, and feel the comfort of their heat.
 
This morning, we gather here together as God’s people, welcomed and warmed, and comforted together not by any old fire, but by the presence of the Holy Spirit of God. Today is the feast of Pentecost, fifty days after the Passover, when our Saviour Jesus Christ gave His life at the cross, and was raised again from the dead.

At Pentecost, the Church was born… God’s Holy Spirit arrived like a mighty wind, breathing God’s life into the Apostles, and filling them with His heavenly fire: uniting them to one another, and empowering them to proclaim the Good News of the Risen Lord Jesus, so that the whole world might draw near to Him and receive God’s new life as well.
 
Our Scripture readings today invite us into the story of Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit… calling to mind not only events from the first days of the Christian Church, but also the essential purpose and source of divine power for all God’s people today. 
 
Our Gospel reading this morning from John Chapter 20, gives us St. John’s account of the Holy Spirit’s gifting to the Apostles… not at Pentecost, as we might expect, but at Easter, at their first meeting after His resurrection.
 
That first Easter evening, St. John tells us that the disciples… just a handful of believers, still wrapping their heads around the message of the resurrection that they heard from Mary and the other women who went to the tomb... St. John says these disciples were gathered together behind locked doors… huddled together in fear of their fellow Israelites, the Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem… whose leaders, just a few days ago had put Jesus to death at the cross.
 
But then, Jesus the Risen Lord Himself arrives, despite all their locked doors and fears, and He says to them: “Peace be with you.” (John 20:21). Then after showing them His wounds… proving to them that He wasn’t a ghost or a vision… He says to them again: “‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” (John 20:21-23)
 
So much is packed into this first meeting! The Risen Lord comes to them pronouncing peace… and commissions them to go out into the world and share in His own ministry… but not before Christ bestows on them the Holy Spirit, God’s own Personal presence and power… who once filled the Tabernacle in the wilderness, and the Temple in Jerusalem with God’s divine glory… and which now filled Christ’s faithful people themselves… turning them together into a living Temple… the ‘place’ on Earth where the Living God is to be made known and encountered.  
 
And along with the Holy Spirit, Jesus entrusts them with the ministry of forgiveness… remaking them into Christ’s royal priesthood and holy nation, as St. Peter would later refer to all Christians… a community set apart to offer others the opportunity to receive the forgiveness of God… and charged with making known God’s Good News and glory… so that the rest of the world can draw near in faith and be reconciled to its Lord as well.
 
One moment, they were a handful of confused and frightened disciples… the next, they were signs and ambassadors of Christ’s Kingdom… transformed from one to the other by the gift of the Holy Spirit, and sent out into the world to share the grace and the gifts they had received from the Risen Lord with God’s wider world.
 
But how would this story unfold? How would the Church grow from that small group gathered together in one room in Jerusalem all those years ago into a truly worldwide family?  
 
Well, for that part of the story, we need to turn to Acts Chapter 2.
 
There we find St. Luke’s account of the Holy Spirit’s arrival on the day of Pentecost… when Jerusalem was filled to the brim with pilgrims from all over the ancient world. But there’s an important detail we need to remember about these pilgrims: St. Luke tells us they were devout Jews, who were gathered to celebrate one of the important Jewish festivals in the Temple, the Feast of Weeks.  
 
By this point in history, there were many communities of Jews living outside the lands of Judea and Jerusalem… with some of these communities reaching back to the days of the Exile, several centuries earlier. And yet, even as they lived as small minorities in the lands of the nations that did not know the LORD their God, many Jews still remained faithful to God’s ways, and made the effort to attend the major feasts as the Torah required.

And so when God’s Holy Spirit was poured out at Pentecost upon Christ’s disciples, empowering them to speak in all sorts of languages and tongues they had not known before, they had as a ready audience God’s faithful people who were already gathered in obedience to the Lord from all around the ancient world… unaware that this Pentecost, God had a great surprise in store: the Good News of the death and resurrection of their Messiah, and the invitation to repent and believe in Him.
 
So the very first step of the Church… the first way in which it grows beyond the handful of those first disciples, involves the restoration and gathering together of God’s own scattered and divided people. God’s power poured out at Pentecost was first put to work overcoming the barriers between God’s own children! Reconciling them to one another by the clear and miraculous communication of the Good News of Jesus the Risen Lord, drawing these diverse brothers and sisters into one family… not just in abstract ideals or theory, but in actual practice, as many of these pilgrims end up staying in Jerusalem and creating the first multi-cultural Church community.  
 
Now there’s so much going on here in Acts Chapter 2, that we can’t really get into this morning… like how what happened with the speaking in tongues is the undoing of the divisions that took place at the Tower of Babylon in Genesis 11. Or how this gathering together of God’s people who had been scattered among the nations brings to mind many of the words of the prophets, like Ezekiel… who pointed forward in hope to God’s plan to restore His children, not only to their land, but also to one another, healing their shattered relationships so they might all share in His blessed life together.
 
Through a small handful of Apostles, not long ago spending their time hiding from their Jewish neighbours, God’s Spirit reached out to devout Jews from all over, and invited them to respond to the Good News of their crucified and risen Messiah. The power of Pentecost was first put to work uniting God’s people around the Good News of Jesus. 
 
And where does the story of the Church go from there? Well, everywhere!
 
The Book of Acts goes on to tell of the expansion of the Church throughout the whole region… from Jerusalem, to Judea and Samaria, and beyond towards the farthest ends of the Earth. And all through Acts, we hear how the early Christians responded to the Spirit of God constantly pushing them and expanding their horizons, and transforming their expectations of what was possible… and where the LORD was leading them.
 
In Acts, we hear St. Paul’s story, who goes from being one of the most devout persecutors of the Church… to one of the most devoted proclaimers of the Good News of Jesus among the Gentiles… the nations who had not known the Living God, or followed His holy ways. Rather than ignoring all these ungodly strangers, the Holy Spirit of God sent folks like St. Paul to share the Good News with them too, inviting everyone, everywhere to draw near to Jesus Christ the Risen Lord in faith… encountering God’s forgiveness and glory up close, and welcoming them into this new Christian community as well.
 
As we know, many of the best things in life aren’t easy, and that was true as the Church continued to spread, and as more and more people from diverse backgrounds and cultures were trying to grow together as God’s people. One of the major areas of tension and controversy in the first decades of the Church revolved around how to handle the diversity of God’s growing family… a challenge each generation of the Church has had to wrestle with in our own ways.
 
And sadly, after two thousand years, a lot of us are still quite scattered and divided… looking around at our fellow Christians and asking ourselves: how are we ever going to get along with those kinds of people? We speak different languages, sing different songs, eat different foods… wear different clothes… and so on.
 
Wouldn’t it be better if we just do our own thing over here, while they do theirs over there?
 
Well, no. What’s better is that we begin to understand that the unity of Christ’s Church is not optional! It’s not a nice add on, it’s the point! We are called to be ground zero of God’s reconciling love at work in the world… beginning with those who already know the Good News of Jesus the Risen Lord… practicing the implications of this Good News together, seeking to be a people of peace… and hope… and love… and forgiveness… so that the rest of the world may come to know and draw near in faith to their Lord and Saviour.
 
Faced with the challenges of trying to help a diverse and fragmented Church learn to come together, St. Paul wrote some powerful words in his letters to the Corinthians.
 
And in our second Scripture reading today from 1 Corinthians 12, we hear the Apostle to the Gentiles offer a profound way of understanding the complex but complimentary reality of the Church, which finds its source of life, unity, and shared identity in the Living and Triune God: 1 Corinthians 12:4-, “Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone.”
 
He goes on to list a number of different ways that God’s Spirit empowers God’s people to share in God’s work and for the good of all: through words of wisdom, or insight, faith, and healing, miracles, prophesy, discernment, speaking in tongues, and interpreting them… all these Spirit powered activities aren’t meant to stand alone, but to serve as one note in the harmony of God’s symphony, and compliment the contributions of others.
 
He then moves on to make explicit that even though the Church is comprised of all sorts of diverse people with different backgrounds, and cultures, and ways to contribute, we are all united by the same Spirit at work in us all:
 
1 Corinthians 12:12-13, “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.”
 
Whatever our natural differences may be… differences of ethnicity, culture, or class… God’s Spirit at work in us makes us one. And the wide variety of gifts within the Church are not grounds for greater division, but for our coming together as we all work together for the common good. 

The story of Pentecost, of the arrival and work of the Holy Spirit through the Church is our story. It’s the beginning of the story of how the Good News spread from that room in Jerusalem where a handful of disciples had gathered, and how this Good News made its way across the centuries and the globe all the way here to meet us in this place today in Gondola Point.
 
And it is also our story in the sense that, if the same Spirit who has done all this is at work in us… then we too are being drawn into the same movement of God, and the ministry of Jesus Christ the Risen Lord in the world.
 
Beginning here in this room… with this handful of disciples as we seek to wrap our heads around the Good News of Jesus the Risen Lord, and learning to walk together in His holy ways. Right here and now God’s own Spirit is drawing us nearer to Jesus in faith, to receive God’s peace from His hands… along with our shared calling to be His own royal priesthood, and holy people… a community set apart to help one another, and those around us experience God’s forgiveness, glory, and grace.
 
And then, moving beyond this room, God’s own Spirit is drawing us nearer to the rest of God’s people… to our Christian brothers and sisters… be they down the street, throughout New Brunswick, or around the world. Of course, we may have some pretty big differences, but we still have the same Lord, and God, and Spirit at work in and through us, who is able to overcome all the obstacles we keep erecting withing the body of Christ… and to reunite us, God’s often scattered and fragmented people through Jesus Christ our Lord.
 
In more concrete terms, how can we work towards closer co-operation and fellowship with our fellow Anglican sisters and brothers here in the Valley? And how can we also honour, and pray for, and support, and extend our sincere love to our Roman Catholic, and Wesleyans, and United, and Baptists, and Pentecostal brothers and sisters as well? How can we see ourselves not as rivals, or as distant acquaintances, but as different members of the same body, each with our own gifts to share, and ways to contribute to the work of Christ’s Kingdom, and the good of all?
 
And like He did with folks like St. Paul, God’s own Spirit can work through us to make the Good News of Jesus the Risen Lord known to those all around us. Not by following some formula, or impersonal technique… but by being attentive to the actual person God places in our path, and to God’s Spirit… a closeness to Him nurtured through times of worship and prayer… and strengthened by our acts of obedience, and our knowledge of God’s good ways made known to us in the Scriptures… trusting that the Spirit of God can give us the right words and the right time. 
 
So as we celebrate the gift of God’s Holy Spirit this Pentecost, may we be open to all of the ways that He wants to work in and through us as Christ’s people today. May we experience the warmth of God’s welcome, forgiveness, and grace as we draw near to Christ’s table in faith. May we receive the comfort that comes from trusting in the Good News of Jesus Christ the Risen Lord. And may we be empowered to share all that we have received from God… for the good of all. Come Holy Spirit, and fill us with Your heavenly fire. Amen.