Rev’d Mark B. Stirdivant, Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Yucaipa, California
✝ sdg ✝

Three of the greatest, most important days of God’s activity in the world’s history were Sundays. First was the day that began created time—that was a Sunday, the first day of the very first week, when God through His Son the Word spoke light into being. Then there was Easter Sunday, when the Son who took human flesh and died in order to destroy sin, death and Satan—He then rose from the dead, and handed to the world the victory He had won. That leaves the final, fulfilled “great Sunday” in human history, and that was fifty days later, the first Christian Pentecost Sunday. It has sometimes been called, “the birthday of the Church,” even though the Church has actually been made up of believers in Christ ever since Adam and Eve were given the promise of a coming Savior. It seems every time the first day of the week comes around, there’s yet another commemoration of the designated day when our Lord creates all things new.

Back in the shadows of the Old Testament, Pentecost was a Hebrew holiday connected with offerings and gifts that the people presented fifty days after the Passover Sabbath. When Jesus fulfilled everything that the Old Testament said, His light revealed the true offering and cast away the shadows. Instead of an offering coming from the people, the true Pentecost reveals a gift from God the Father and the Son. On this Pentecost comes the gift of the Holy Spirit, who as the creed says, proceeds from the Father and the Son, and together with the Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit is worshiped as Almighty God and glorified.

This is a big day. The world, and especially the Church, has never been the same since Pentecost. Sinful human beings like you and I are have acted in coordination with the devil to mess up ourselves and our world. God Himself is breaking in to bring life, forgiveness and renewal to a crumbling creation that desperately needs it. Though He will ultimately destroy this present world and create a new heavens and a new earth to be our eternal home with Him, He is still here, wherever you hear His voice and His Word, converting and re-creating within you that which sin had torn down and turned against the Lord.

The most striking example of this renewal is laid out for you in the readings for today. Witness what happened so long ago, as recorded in Genesis 11. This was not long after Noah and the flood, and the world had a fresh start. But sinful people took God’s gift of a common language and misused it for their own selfish gain. They wanted to build a fabulous city with a high tower that would make them unified, and give them an identity all of their own. Already they were tired of the unity that God provided as His gift to them; they were sick of being content with His identity that He had already given them. They were going to put all their trust in their building project, in their own works and deeds to give them the blessings they enjoy, rather than turning to the Lord who created them, who saved them through the Great Flood and brought them together in one language.

And the Lord didn’t have to do much at Babel. He simply let their sin, and the chaos that it naturally produces, take over these people. They sincerely desired to proceed in their plans with God totally out of the picture. Often God answers the sinful intents of people by giving them precisely what they want. In many cases, there is no worse punishment possible! That is the frightening thing for you, isn’t it? You may want something so bad, you can’t imagine life without it. You don’t think you’re going to get it, until you do, and you wish you had never even thought about it. That’s when you finally figure it out that whatever you desired actually became for you your god, just like the citizens of Babel made their own god out of building that tower. Out of their disdain for the Lord and their high praise of themselves, God mixed up their languages and scattered them—the result that they had feared the most. This is one teaching you gain from this: You inevitably see that there is always something missing in your hunt for things, fame, identity, power, popularity, and the good life. What is missing? In a word: peace is what’s missing.

And Jesus offers you not the fake peace that the world cherishes and bombards you with like annoying commercials, phone sales calls or Internet pop-up ads. Jesus gives you a Pentecost gift when He simply says: Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid. The peace comes not as some light-hearted feeling that makes you tingle inside. The peace of Jesus is actually His gift of the Holy Spirit. This is something real, and truly powerful. Note what the gift of the Holy Spirit does to those frightened, bewildered apostles in the upper room: He fills them with joy, gives them boldness to preach in the face of certain resistance, and certainly not the least spectacular, He gives them the gift of speaking in other, clearly distinguishable languages.

Do you see now the great fulfillment that took place? The confusion and scattering due to a multiplicity of languages has now at Pentecost been undone. God is at work uniting His dispersed people, but it’s not by wiping out all those diverse tongues and creating one language. Instead He accomplishes the reversal of Babel’s curse by preaching the Gospel in the mouths of His first pastors in many different languages—the specific languages of the very people who were visiting Jerusalem at that same time! The judgment of God handed down so long ago in Genesis was finally turned on its head in Acts. And all of this was thanks to the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, as Jesus promised.

For Jesus Himself had said the Holy Spirit is the Comforter, the Helper. Why would your Lord give you a comforter if He did not know that you will be needing comfort? He says let not your heart be troubled. Then that must mean He must know that you constantly face fears and uncertainties and temptations to sin. You who could never have helped yourself any day of your life, be assured that Jesus has not left you as orphans. His Holy Spirit helps you as you struggle in this time known as the Christian’s life on earth: a time of trouble, hardship, and evil, but because of your Savior Jesus Christ it is a life full of true Holy Spirit-filled joy. You have His Word and His promise that you are forgiven. The blessed eternal inheritance has been yours ever since the water of Baptism placed the Holy Spirit into your heart.

On this big Sunday of Pentecost, your prideful, crumbling, self-centered Babel heart is rebuilt and re-centered, thanks to the death of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. His gift of the Holy Spirit comes to you only one way—from His Word. From the Word you hear and read, from the Word with which you are washed, the Word you eat, the Word you drink. And the renewal of your life, the renewal of the world, the renewal of the Church, leave that up to Him. Put your trust not in the promises or personalities of men, nor in slick gimmicks or sales pitches, nor any fabulous tower-building projects to preserve the Church, for those are sure to crumble sooner or later. Rather secure your trust squarely on Jesus Christ by the help of the Holy Spirit. It is a promise on which your Lord always comes through; He will never fail. Come, O Holy Spirit, and lead us every day to Jesus.

In the Name of the Father and of the ✝ Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Readings:
Gen. 11:1–9 Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth
Psalm 143 I remember the days of old; I meditate on all Your works
Acts 2:1–21 how is it that we hear, each in our own language in which we were born?
John 14:23–31 the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things