June 8, 2014 (Day of Pentecost) – Acts 2:1-21
Acts 2:1-21
Blowing the Story Forward
Day of Pentecost – June 8, 2014
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
When Emma whom we’ve baptized today gets to be a certain age,
her father or mother will build some sort of building or tower out of blocks –
and she will smash it to smithereens!
And then – will ask to do again. And again. And again.
All children do this.
Today I’m going to suggest that maybe all children do this –
because they’re made in the image of the living God!
We were made, the creation story tells, us in order multiply and fill the face of the earth,
to go to every nook and cranny to be caretakers of the earth together with God.
That’s what human beings are for in the biblical view: to fill the earth and care for it and
for one another.
But that’s a big task and it’s a lot of work.
So it doesn’t take long in the biblical story – about 10 chapters or so –
before human beings settle down in just one place and decide to stay there and
shrink their area of responsibility by building a building with walls and
a tower.
God sees straightaway that the problem is that they all speak one language.
God sees that they have closed themselves off from the wideness of creation by
building these walls around themselves.
So God decides to scatter them so that the whole wide earth can be blessed.
So God gives them different languages – and they move away from one another,
and are scattered over the face of the earth – so they can look after the whole earth and
fill it with blessing.
It’s ironic, right, that while people saw this story of the Tower of Babel as a curse,
God meant it for blessing.
But then that’s the way God often works: what we see as curse, God can turn to blessing.
God takes down the walls and towers we build – for blessing.
In the story of Pentecost today from the book of Acts, we once again see the disciples
shut up in a room in a house “in one place.”
And God looks and thinks, “This will never do.”
So he blows a wind through them out into the streets and enables them to be understood by
people from throughout the whole known world.
He fills them with fire of love so that they can be blessing throughout the wide world.
From this point in the story God scatters the disciples throughout the world in the book of Acts
so that they can be caretakers of the whole earth and every person in it.
So they can bring blessing to the whole earth – and every person in it.
This is the story of the church.
It’s about God moving the story forward when we build walls to shrink God’s area of concern.
God takes down the walls and towers we build – for blessing.
God is always working to move the story of blessing forward.
At First Lutheran Church God sent a wind that blew us out into Victor Street to feed the hungry
with our Food Banks and Community Meals.
At First Lutheran Church God sent the fire of love into our hearts to start the Kids Club
free drop in ministry for the vulnerable children of this neighbourhood.
At First Lutheran Church today God has sent us Melinda to be our Congregational Ministry
Assistant so that we can enable ourselves to do more ministry in the wide world that
God so loves.
And today at First Lutheran Church God has added to our number this beautiful child Emma to
help us in that task of filling this neighbourhood and
filling this wide world with blessing.
For she has become part of our body.
We are the church: we are not bodies.
We are one body.
We now are the physical body of Jesus on earth.
On Pentecost Jesus filled the disciples with his Spirit, his energy,
so that they might be inspired and empowered to act just like Jesus.
To feed, to heal, to forgive, to include, to raise to new life: to bring blessing wherever we are.
Today Emma Lynn has been giving a share of that Spirit in the laying on of hands so that
she can participate in that work with us.
Today Melinda has had the Spirit given her in baptism stirred up for a ministry that will
enable us to steward our gifts and our talents and our wisdom and our energy for
filling the earth with blessing.
Today, God is moving the story forward, continuing to tear down the walls and barriers that we
put up that would restrict the sphere of God’s blessing.
Today is Pentecost – again.
So together let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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