The first reading today, that famous reading from the Acts of the Apostles, takes us back to that period right after Easter, before all that energy and growth and activity in the early church we’ve heard in the readings of the past six weeks. Today we’re back in time to the period immediately following Jesus’s death, and we see the disciples not as these almost miraculous leaders, but in a room waiting for something to happen to them. It’s hard not to wonder what that felt like, and what they were thinking.
The picture probably didn’t seem promising. These were people who had in their time abandoned Jesus, misunderstood instructions, lost heart, argued about status, and now with Jesus gone, they are gathered indoors, waiting for they don’t know what, seemingly uncertain about what to do next, who they are. They have seen the risen Christ, you’d think that would change anyone forever, but still, without him, how can this group possibly do what he said? It’s not hard to imagine that the temptation to go back to the lives they had left behind, was still very strong. How were these uneducated, unprominent, uncredentialed people going to change the world?
But today that period of fear and confusion and their lack of understanding about how they could do this was suddenly over, and they just start. People who seemed totally uncertain were talking with people they’d never seen before and never communicated with before, and those people can hear them and understand them. It looks to us like they are all filled with an energy that we only see glimpses of in our own lives. They are out of that room, and the waiting is over.
They are still damaged and imperfect people, but they had a task to do that Jesus had been preparing them for for years, and all of a sudden, they begin. Our current pope calls the Holy Spirit the strength of God, and that’s what they suddenly get, the strength to change and go forward, and not just in any direction, but the direction that God called them to, a direction that brings redemption and forward movement and healing and building up. This church we are part of is a church of the Spirit, and that’s what the Spirit does.
But we’re humans, and we are not always ready to go forward. There is a closed-in-ness that is an inevitable movement in human life, maybe especially as we get older, as life kicks us around with age and loss and disappointment, or as we just get distracted by tasks that become more important to us than they should. It isn’t so much that we get tired as that we steer away from what we worry we might not have the power to do. We avoid risk, or things that look like they might be depressing or too hard, or that we think and hope are someone else’s job. If we don’t lock ourselves into a room like the disciples in the gospel today we gradually find a way to draw constraints around ourselves just as efficiently. We define our future by the way things seem to have turned out, not by what we believe God can and will do for us if we allow it to happen.
The Holy Spirit is here to help us out of that room, if we want to get out. Sometimes the Spirit comes in a dramatic moment, a surprising decision and burst of energy. Sometimes the Spirit just gives us a quiet realization that what’s next for us is something we’ve known about for a long time, but have pushed aside as something we just don’t think we have the strength or patience for.
The point is not that we need to believe in some kind of gospel of self-fulfillment, that God wants us to convince ourselves we can do anything we imagine. This isn’t about being able to do anything, but being able to trust that with the Spirit we can do what we were called to do. That is what happened at Pentecost to these disciples. Paul says today that every individual gets some manifestation of the Spirit, some gift of the Spirit that is theirs and not someone else’s. If you think you’re an exception to this, then you’re in the wrong place today, because asking for insight into what that gift is for you, now, and asking to get sent into the world strengthened by God to embrace it, is why we’re all here on the feast of the Holy Spirit.
Ordinary Christians do amazing things. It’s not ancient history. Even today, they bring peace in relationships and even among countries, they find a way to change the church little by little, they stand up for people the world treats like dirt, they give hope to the sick, or maybe they just reach out yet again to one impossible person who needs them. We know this happens, it all sounds great, and yet over and over we don’t feel worthy, we think we don’t know enough, it’s too discouraging, we still think that we’re down here left on our own. But today and every Sunday we are all gathered in a room today like the disciples were, and we come together for the same reason, because Jesus told us one, to stick together, and two, to be ready. If we think there are things God isn’t strong enough to do with us, some day, if we keep asking, the Spirit will prove us wrong.