A sermon preached by Pastor Lewis Polzin on May 17, 2018 for the Wednesday Chapel of St. Peter–Immanuel Lutheran School in Milwaukee, WI, on Acts 2:1-21. You may read the text and play the audio of the sermon here.
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
My dear friends in Christ,
This week, the Church enters the season of what we call Pentecost. Pentecost is just a big fancy word that means 50. This coming Sunday will be 50 days after the Passover, the weekend we celebrate Easter, the day when our Lord rose up from the dead. In the Jewish religion, this was a festival set aside to thank God for the first harvest of wheat for the year. Wheat was so important to them, just as it is to us. It goes into our bread, into almost everything we eat. It’s a staple, it’s a necessity, and the people were celebrating that God granted them another harvest, another time where they would get to look forward to the future and know they are being taken care of because of all the wheat they gathered into the storehouses.
It’s appropriate then, that the Church would celebrate this day, too. We aren’t thanking God for the wheat, though we certainly can and should, just as we thank God before every meal we eat, but we thank God for the harvest of souls that happened on Pentecost day. The Holy Spirit came down from heaven and gave all of the apostles the ability to speak in another language so that all the people who were in Jerusalem on Pentecost could understand it.
If I went to the pygmy tribes in Africa and just started telling them about Jesus in English, no one would understand me. They don’t speak English. But, on Pentecost, millions of people who were present in Jerusalem got to hear the apostles speak in their language. The apostles spoke two languages called Aramaic and Greek. Now, a lot, but not everyone knew Greek. A lot of people spoke things like Egyptian, Arabic, Latin, Phrygian. And the apostles, who, as far as we know, didn’t know those languages, were made to speak those languages by the Holy Spirit. He gave them the ability even though they didn’t know it. It’s pretty amazing.
But, the gift of speaking in another language isn’t just there. It’s not like a new sweater that your auntie gets you for your birthday. This gift of the Holy Spirit was so that people could hear the good news about Jesus Christ in their own language, so they could immediately understand and believe and take that message back to their own people. And they did. 3000 people believed in Jesus Christ that day and were baptized. The Church went from 12 people gathered in a small to 3000 people in a day. In just a couple hundred years, they numbered in the millions. 2000 years after Pentecost, we now number 3.5 billion people. This is the gift of the Holy Spirit.
And Pentecost didn’t just end. It’s a day that began 2000 years ago and it’s as if we’re still celebrating it. That’s because I can tell you the good news of Jesus Christ in YOUR language. This morning I’m speaking Enlgish to you. I can tell you that, even though you are a sinner, Christ loved you before you were ever created. And He came to earth in human flesh to take your sin upon Himself and die for you. He was crucified for you. Three days after He died, He rose from the dead so that you would know that, if you are in Him, you also have the promise of rising from the dead into everlasting, never-ending life.
The fact that you can hear this in your language, English, today, is a gift of the Holy Spirit. He wants to spread the good news of Jesus Christ all around the world, to all people, to all languages. Today, there are, of last count, 6909 distinct languages. That’s a lot of languages. Today, missionaries go to all these different people and try to learn their language so they can tell others about Jesus. To date, we’ve translated the full Bible into 670 languages. We’ve translated the New Testament into 1521 languages and the Old into 1121 languages. We have a lot of work left to do, don’t we?
We’re not really given to speak other languages like the apostles did anymore, and that’s okay. What Pentecost means for us is that we get to try to tell everyone in every language. There’s no special one that Jesus loves more than another. He loves the people of every tribe and language. And He loves you. And you know that this is true because you can hear the good news in your ears and understand it.
God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit love you and have wanted you to hear the good news, so, once upon a time, the Bible was translated into English. And today, you can hear the good news always. And the good news is that Jesus loves, He died for you, rose for you, ascended for you, and will always forgive you your sins so you can live with Him forever.
You are the harvest of Pentecost, my friends. And we thank God for you every single day. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Now may the peace of God which passes all human understanding guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, our Lord! Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment